"Robust Advertisement Pricing"

joint with Tan Gan (SSRN; arXiv; Slides)

We consider the robust pricing problem of an advertising platform that charges a producer for disclosing hard evidence of product quality to a consumer before trading. Multiple equilibria arise since consumer beliefs and producer's contingent advertisement purchases are interdependent. To tackle strategic uncertainty, the platform offers each producer's quality type a menu of disclosure-probability-and-price plans to maximize its revenue guaranteed across all equilibria. The optimal menus offer a continuum of plans with strictly increasing marginal prices for higher disclosure probabilities. Full disclosure is implemented in the unique equilibrium. All partial-disclosure plans, though off-path, preclude bad equilibrium play. This solution admits a tractable price function that suggests volume-based pricing can outperform click-based pricing when strategic uncertainty is accounted for. Moreover, the platform prioritizes attracting higher types into service and offers them higher rents despite symmetric information between the platform and the producer.

"Multiplayer War of Attrition with Asymmetric Private Information"

joint with Jialu Zhang (Bachelor Thesis; arXiv)

This paper studies a war of attrition game in the setting of public good provision that combines three elements: (i) multiple players, (ii) incomplete information, and (iii) ex-ante asymmetry. 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 in value (expressed in a form of hazard rate) provides the good type-wise uniformly faster. In large societies, the cost of delay is mainly determined by the highest type of the instant-exit player.

"Robust Contract with Career Concerns"

joint with Tan Gan

"Contracting with Indirect Externalities"

joint with Tan Gan