Welcome to my website!
I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at the
WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
I am an economic theorist specializing in information economics. I study how informational environments can be designed to improve strategic outcomes in realistic institutional settings, with an emphasis on digital and media economics.
We investigate the efficiency of agreements with the following features: (i) self-enforcing---any agent can walk away from the agreement at any moment; (ii) dynamic---payouts occur stochastically while the agreement is in force; (iii) risky---one agent is more favored by the agreement but the favored agent is unknown ex-ante. These features appear in international economic agreements, such as the WTO. Such arrangements have formal or informal mechanisms to resolve disputes that may be more favorable to one agent, but who is favored is learned only as disputes arise. Welfare combines the agents' joint surplus with a positive societal externality generated while the agreement is in force. Some efficient agreements never form, and risky agreements end with certainty as disputes provide information about favor status. We find that when the agreement stakes are high, welfare is maximal at intermediate beliefs that balance optimism sufficient for agents' participation with the sustained uncertainty that makes the agreement socially valuable. Slow judgments are optimal when the externality is sufficiently strong. While global welfare is maximized by symmetric judgment frequencies, mild asymmetry can locally increase welfare by promoting participation and improving the informational value of the agreement.
We examine communication between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver with a presence of a strategic fact-checker.
The sender makes a claim about an issue to persuade the receiver to approve the sender's proposal.
The fact-checker has its own goal and chooses a stochastic fact-checking policy that checks sender's claims.
Checking a claim is costly and, with some probability, can fail to verify whether the claim is true or false.
Full fact-checking is optimal when the cost is below a threshold. Otherwise, no fact-checking is optimal.
We characterize the cost threshold as a function of fact-checker's preferences.
The receiver need not prefer a fact-checker with preferences aligned with the receiver to one with opposed preferences. Adding multiple fact-checkers does not necessarily improve communication even when all fact-checkers are willing to fully check by themselves. For intermediate cost of checking, having multiple fact-checkers can lead to underprovision of fact-checking due to free riding.
This paper presents the optimal editorial policy for state-owned media who can manipulate information flow
from a strategic informed elite to an uninformed receiver.
The receiver attempts to match the state of the ruler’s competence with a binary action.
If the elite’s and audience’s preferences are too distant from each other,
then the editorial policy is uninformative. Otherwise, the media signal whether the state is
higher or lower than a threshold which depends on the elite’s preferences.
The media benefit from a more lenient elite, as long as the elite is not too lenient.
The media are worse off when the receiver is more critical of the ruler,
whereas the elite generally is better off when the receiver is more critical.
When the receiver has private information about how critical he is,
I characterize the lower bound on the media’s payoff obtained within the class of restricted editorial policies.
I identify a condition on the distribution of receiver’s private information that implies the media’s payoff attains
this lower bound.
Review of Economic Studies 91.2 (2024): 1007-1038.
Many e-commerce platforms use buyers’ personal data to intermediate their transactions with sellers.
How much value do such intermediaries derive from the data record of each single individual?
We characterize this value and find that one of its key components is a novel externality between records,
which arises when the intermediary pools some records to withhold the information they contain.
Our analysis has several implications about compensating individuals for the use of their data,
guiding companies’ investments in data acquisition, and more broadly studying the demand side of data markets.
Our methods combine modern information design with classic duality theory and apply to a large class of principal-agent problems.
