"Contracting for Experimentation with Private Discovery" (draft coming soon!)

A principal hires an agent to work on a project of unknown quality. Success is contractible, but before it occurs, the agent may privately observe a discovery. For example, a scientist developing a drug may observe a promising result only he can interpret. An informed agent may conceal the discovery; an uninformed agent may fake one. Compensation can depend on whether and when the discovery is reported. Yet an optimal contract is a posted bonus sequence using only success bonuses tied to time, not reports. Dynamically arriving private information drives this simplicity: deterring concealment limits pay differences across report histories, eliminating gains from report-contingent pay. Bonuses are high and rising in a research stage that induces learning, then low and flat in a development stage that keeps only the informed agent working. Rising bonuses reflect a novel force: rents from private learning motivate effort but shrink as fewer research periods remain.

"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: June 2026

We study optimal contracting when workers face career concerns. Labor markets infer ability from performance, but effort affects how informative performance is. This feedback can generate strategic uncertainty: bonuses inducing effort under optimistic beliefs about effort may fail under pessimistic beliefs. We characterize this force through a criterion tied to skill-effort complementarity and solve for the least-cost policy implementing effort in every equilibrium. Under strategic uncertainty, the employer uses dispersed bonuses. High bonuses rule out pessimistic beliefs, raising the reputational stakes and letting lower bonuses motivate effort. Pay dispersion among observationally identical workers grows with career concerns and skill-wage assortativeness.

"Contracting against a Non-contractible Outsider"

[Latest; SSRN; arXiv]

Last Update: September 2025

I study a general framework of contracting with externalities involving a non-contractible outsider. Strategic symmetry—even including 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 new one where she selects a series of agent beliefs about outsider behavior. Unique implementation then reduces to a constraint on these beliefs: the principal cannot convince the agent to expect the outsider to play non-guaranteed responses. Due to strategic rents, the principal optimally induces attenuated agent incentives. In the case of symmetric strategic dependence, her coordination power and commitment power are perfect substitutes in determining contracting outcome; on contractual privacy, the principal can strictly prefer private contracting over public 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 lower patience, lower cost, and higher "reputation" (measured by greater hazard rate of the 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 Powerless"

A principal who offers a contract may renege when her default option is sufficiently attractive. The size of this temptation, which measures her commitment power, is often her private information. This paper asks how contracting outcomes change under this information asymmetry. Disciplining off-path beliefs with the Intuitive Criterion, I find that every type of principal behaves and earns payoffs exactly as if she were commonly known to have the least commitment power. Hidden commitment power is therefore powerless. Commitment power is valuable under symmetric information. Concealing it is what destroys its value. The result delivers an unambiguous policy lesson on how to mitigate this information asymmetry prior to contracting: only measures that improve the worst case have value. Applied to credit rating, optimal disclosure is monotone-partitional, and each issuer contracts on the floor of her rating band.