Research

Forthcoming Papers

The Value of Data Records (with Simone Galperti and Jacopo Perego),
Forthcoming at The Review of Economic Studies

• 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.

Working Papers

Communication with Strategic Fact-checking (job market paper)

• 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.

Strategic Mediation of Information in Autocracies (new draft coming soon, previous draft here)

• 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.

Work in Progress

Dynamics of Risky Agreements (with Renee Bowen and Malte Lammert)