"Robust Pricing for Quality Disclosure"

with Tan Gan [Latest; SSRN; arXiv]

Revise and Resubmit at The Review of Economic Studies

Last update: June 2025

A platform charges a producer for disclosing quality evidence to consumers before trade. It aims to maximize its revenue guarantee across potentially multiple equilibria which arise from the interdependence of producer purchase decisions and consumer beliefs. The platform's optimal pricing strategy entrenches itself as a market gatekeeper: it induces a unique equilibrium in which non-disclosed products' perceived values are lower than the production cost. To achieve this goal, this pricing strategy iteratively destabilizes under-disclosure equilibria by luring producers to disclose slightly more. Higher-quality producers receive higher rents as their disclosure is prioritized. Despite losing rents, the platform optimally induces socially efficient information transmission for any given evidence structure, and it never benefits from garbling evidence. Compared to the non-robust benchmark, our framework generates more intuitive comparative statics: the platform's ability to extract surplus increases with its value as an information intermediary.

Abstract in EC'24 as Robust Advertisement Pricing

"Robust Contracting with Career Concerns"

with Tan Gan [Latest; SSRN; arXiv]

Last update: January 2026

We study optimal contracting with career concerns, where an employer offers a success-contingent wage to a worker whose future payoff depends on a labor market’s evaluation of his skill. When effort and skill are complementary in productivity, higher market expectations about effort yield stronger career concerns, generating multiple equilibria. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for this multiplicity, closely linked to assortative matching between skills and wages. To robustly induce effort, the employer optimally uses private wage randomization, generating wage dispersion among ex ante identical workers. Our results provide new implications for residual wage inequality and wage-history privacy policies.

"Contracting against Non-contractible Outsider"

[Latest; SSRN; arXiv]

Last Update: September 2025

I study a general framework of contracting with externalities involving a non-contractible outsider. \emph{Strategic symmetry}---including strategic complementarity and strategic substitution---between the insider agent and the outsider leads to multiple equilibria. To tackle strategic uncertainty, the principal guarantees a unique equilibrium outcome. A novel duality approach reformulates her problem as a series of problems where she selects the agent's expectations about outsider behavior. The key constraint is that the principal cannot convince the agent to expect non-guaranteed responses from the outsider. To reduce strategic rents, the principal optimally induces attenuated agent incentives. With symmetric strategic dependence, her coordination power and commitment power are perfect substitutes in determining contracting outcome, and public contracting can strictly decrease her surplus compared to private contracting, in sharp contrast to the benchmark that ignores robustness . Applications include regulating international competition, platform design, and labor union contracting.

"Multiple-Player War of Attrition with Asymmetric Private Values"

[Latest; arXiv]

Last Update: August 2023

This paper studies a war of attrition game in the setting of public good provision among multiple ex-ante asymmetric privately informed players. In the unique equilibrium, asymmetry leads to a stratified behavior pattern where one player provides the public good instantly with a positive probability, while each of the other players has a player-specific strict-waiting time, before which even his highest type will not provide the good. Comparative statics show that a player with less patience, lower cost of provision, and higher reputation (measured by greater hazard rate of valuation for the public good) provides the good type-wise faster. In large societies, the cost of delay is mainly determined by the highest type of the player with the highest reputation.

"Hidden Commitment Power is No Commitment Power"

"Hidden Innovativity"

Teaching Fellow: Yale ECON 2121 01 (FA25), Intermediate Microeconomics

Instructor: Evangelia Chalioti

Teaching Fellow: Yale ECON 351 01 (SP25), Mathematical Economics: Game Theory

Instructor: Elliot Lipnowski

Teaching Fellow: Yale ECON 121 01 (SP24), Intermediate Microeconomics

Instructor: Tilman Borgers

Teaching Fellow: Yale ECON 121 01 (FA23), Intermediate Microeconomics

Instructor: Evangelia Chalioti