"Robust Contract with Career Concerns"

with Tan Gan [Latest; SSRN; arXiv]

Last update: July 2025

An employer contracts with a worker to incentivize efforts whose productivity depends on ability; the worker then enters a market that pays him contingent on ability evaluation. With non-additive monitoring technology, the interdependence between market expectations and worker efforts can lead to multiple equilibria (contrasting Holmstrom (1982/1999); Gibbons and Murphy (1992)). We identify a sufficient and necessary criterion for the employer to face such strategic uncertainty—one linked to skill-effort complementarity, a pervasive feature of labor markets. To fully implement work, the employer optimally creates private wage discrimination to iteratively eliminate pessimistic market expectations and low worker efforts. Our result suggests that present contractual privacy, employers' coordination motives generate within-group pay inequality. The comparative statics further explain several stylized facts about residual wage dispersion.

"Robust Pricing for Quality Disclosure"

with Tan Gan [Latest; SSRN; arXiv]

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

"Contracting against Non-contractible Outsider"

[Latest; SSRN; arXiv]

Last Update: September 2025

I study a general framework of contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider gives rise to multiple equilibria. To tackle strategic uncertainty, the principal guarantees actions in a unique equilibrium. A novel duality approach reformulates her problem as a series of problems in which she selects agent expectations. The key constraint is that the principal cannot convince the agent to expect non-guaranteed response from the outsider. Due to strategic rents, the principal optimally induces attenuated agent incentives. With completely symmetric strategic dependence, her coordination and commitment power become perfect substitutes; in addition, public contracting can strictly decrease her surplus compared to private contracting, in sharp contrast with the case where she 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 uniformly faster. In large societies, the cost of delay is mainly determined by the highest type of the player with the highest reputation.

"Funding 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