Research

Publication(s)

''Efficiency and Surplus Distribution in Majoritarian Reputational Bargaining'', Journal of Economic Theory, 2023

(An older version is here. )

Working Papers

"All-pay Campaign and Electoral Accountability " (A new version with new results coming soon!)

In an electoral campaign, all candidates can spend resource on valence issues in order to win voters' support.  When an incumbent faces an imminent election in the form of such an all-pay campaign, does she have any incentive to serve the interest of a representative voter? We approach this question through a model in which candidates have hidden ideologies and no policy commitment power. We find that the accountability provided by an all-pay campaign is not monotonic in either office benefit or spending effectiveness. 

``Information Aggregation through Informal Election on Slippery Slope'' (with Zhengqing Gui; draft available upon request)

A policy maker may have slippery-slope concern when she evaluates a reform: for some unknown distribution of agents' preferences, the reform paves the way to future instability or other undesirable outcomes.   We propose a simple model to investigate whether informal elections, including protests, polls and non-binding voting, can aggregate dispersed information about the desirability of a reform when the policy maker has slippery-slope concern.  In our model, the policy maker uses a non-monotonic rule in response to an informal election: she reforms if the turnout in the informal election is neither too low nor too high. This non-monotonicity may obstruct information aggregation: we identify conditions under which full information equivalence is impossible when the population approaches infinity.

''Competing Auctions with Informed Sellers'' (with Nicolas Riquelme)

We study competing auctions where each seller has private information about the quality of his object and chooses the reserve price of a second-price auction. Buyers observe the reserve prices and decide which auction to participate in. For a class of primitives, we show that a perfect Bayesian equilibrium exists for any finite market. In any such PBE, higher quality is signaled through higher reserve price at the expense of trade opportunities. But there might be bunching regions causing inefficiencies. In fact, in the large-market limit characterized by a directed search model, the interaction of adverse selection and search frictions entail distortion at the bottom: when either the buyer-seller ratio is sufficiently large or a regularity condition is met, there is no separating PBE in which the lowest-quality seller sets reserve price equal to his opportunity cost. This finding carries over to large finite markets and is consistent with observed behavior in auctions for used cars in UK (Choi et.al 2016). 

''Extreme Agenda Setting Power in Dynamic Bargaining Games'' (with John Duggan)

We investigate a canonical model of bargaining with a fixed agenda setter, and we show that when players are impatient or the set of alternatives is one-dimesional, the equilibrium outcome from the static model obtains; but when players are patient and the alternatives are multidimensional, the equilibrium outcome typically converges to the ideal point of the agenda setter. 

Work in Progress

Miscellaneous (something fun)

"A Note on Asymptotic Stationary Equilibrium Payoffs of Divide-the-Dollar" 

In a Baron-Ferejohn divide-the-dollar model with n agents and q-quota voting rule, consider the mapping from interior recognition protocols to asymptotic (as agents become patient) stationary equilibrium payoffs. The image of this mapping is of dimension n-q, instead of the whole interior of the n-simplex, which is the case with proper discounting.