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 " (2024 brand new version!)

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 study this question in a two-term model in which candidates have hidden ideologies and no policy commitment power. Depending on office benefit and spending effectiveness, the all-pay campaign may provide stronger accountability than the retention (Banks and Sundaram, 1998) or incentivize outright extremism. 

''Competing Auctions with Informed Sellers'' (with Nicolas Riquelme; 2024 brand new version!)

We study a game of competing second-price auctions in which each seller privately observes the quality of her object and chooses a reserve price for her auction. Buyers observe the reserve prices and then decide on participation and bidding in at most one auction. We show: (1) there exists a symmetric perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE) when there are finitely many sellers and buyers; (2) symmetric PBE converge to a class of competitive ``limit equilibria'' as the number of players increases to infinity; (3) there is no separating limit equilibrium in which the lowest-quality seller posts a reserve price equal to her opportunity cost -- full separation entails exclusion of buyers who can generate social surplus from trade. 

``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.

''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.