Covert learning and disclosure
Authors: Matteo Escudé
Abstract
I study a model of information acquisition and transmission in which the sender's ability to misreport her findings is limited. In equilibrium, the sender only influences the receiver by choosing to remain selectively ignorant, rather than by deceiving her about the discoveries. Although deception does not occur, I highlight how deception possibilities determine what information the sender chooses to acquire and transmit. I then turn to comparative statics, characterizing in which sense the sender benefits from her claims being more verifiable, showing this is akin to increasing her commitment power. Finally, I characterize sender- and receiver-optimal falsification environments.
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Mechanism Design with Informational PunishmentBenjamin Balzer, Johannes Schneider · 2022 · Games and Economic Behavior, 2023, 40, pp 197-209 · Not summarized yet
Abstract
We introduce \emph{informational punishment} to the design of mechanisms that compete with an exogenous status quo mechanism: Players can send garbled public messages with some delay, and others cannot commit to ignoring them. Optimal informational punishment ensures that full participation is without loss, even if any single player can publicly enforce the status quo mechanism. Informational punishment permits using a standard revelation principle, is independent of the mechanism designer's objective, and operates exclusively off the equilibrium path. It is robust to refinements and applies in informed-principal settings. We provide conditions that make it robust to opportunistic signal des…
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From Doubt to Devotion: Trials and Learning-Based PricingTan Gan, Nicholas Wu · 2023 · Theoretical Economics · AI summary available
Abstract
An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this dynamic informed principal problem. The belief gap between the informed seller and the uninformed buyer, coupled with the buyer's learning, gives rise to mechanisms that provide the skeptical buyer with limited access to the product and an option to upgrade if the buyer is swayed by a good experience. Depending on the seller's screening technology, this takes the form of free/discounted trials or tiered pricing, which are prevalent in digital markets. In c…
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Designing binary social decisionsKirneva Margarita, Núñez Matías · 2023 · Theoretical Economics · AI summary available
Abstract
We design a mechanism, Majority voting with random checks, that fully implements the majority rule for binary social decisions. After a simultaneous vote over the two options, the winner must be confirmed by at least one agent from a random sample of agents voting sequentially. The mechanism incentivizes agents to act truthfully as a lottery is held if no agent confirms the outcome. Our mechanism also reduces by almost half the number of stages required for implementation. Furthermore, we extend our results to incomplete information and abstention and introduce additional implementation mechanisms based on the concept of network formation
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Optimal Procurement Design: A Reduced Form ApproachKun Zhang · 2025 · Theoretical Economics · AI summary available
Abstract
Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the buyer's valuation of the supplied good depends directly on its quality, which is unverifiable and unobservable to the buyer. For a broad class of procurement problems, we identify procurement mechanisms maximizing any weighted average of the buyer's expected payoff and social surplus. The optimal mechanism can be implemented by an auction that restricts sellers to submit bids within specific intervals.
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Gacha Game: When Prospect Theory Meets Optimal PricingTan Gan · 2022 · Theoretical Economics · AI summary available
Abstract
I study the optimal pricing process for selling a unit good to a buyer with prospect theory preferences. In the presence of probability weighting, the buyer is dynamically inconsistent and can be either sophisticated or naive about her own inconsistency. If the buyer is naive, the uniquely optimal mechanism is to sell a ``loot box'' that delivers the good with some constant probability in each period. In contrast, if the buyer is sophisticated, the uniquely optimal mechanism introduces worst-case insurance: after successive failures in obtaining the good from all previous loot boxes, the buyer can purchase the good at full price.
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Corporate Culture and Organizational FragilityMatthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub, Matthieu V. Leduc · 2023 · Theoretical Economics · AI summary available
Abstract
Complex organizations accomplish tasks through many steps of collaboration among workers. Corporate culture supports collaborations by establishing norms and reducing misunderstandings. Because a strong corporate culture relies on costly, voluntary investments by many workers, we model it as an organizational public good, subject to standard free-riding problems, which become severe in large organizations. Our main finding is that voluntary contributions to culture can nevertheless be sustained, because an organization's equilibrium productivity is endogenously highly sensitive to individual contributions. However, the completion of complex tasks is then necessarily fragile to small shocks t…
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Platform-Mediated CompetitionQuitzé Valenzuela-Stookey · 2020 · Theoretical Economics · AI summary available
Abstract
Cross-group externalities and network effects in two-sided platform markets shape market structure and competition policy, and are the subject of extensive study. Less understood are the within-group externalities that arise when the platform designs many-to-many matchings: the value to agent $i$ of matching with agent $j$ may depend on the set of agents with which $j$ is matched. These effects are present in a wide range of settings in which firms compete for individuals' custom or attention. I characterize platform-optimal matchings in a general model of many-to-many matching with within-group externalities. I prove a set of comparative statics results for optimal matchings, and show how t…
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Wealth Redistribution and Mutual Aid: Comparison using Equivalent/Nonequivalent Exchange Models of EconophysicsTakeshi Kato · 2022 · Entropy 2023, 25(2), 224 · AI summary available
Abstract
Given the wealth inequality worldwide, there is an urgent need to identify the mode of wealth exchange through which it arises. To address the research gap regarding models that combine equivalent exchange and redistribution, this study compares an equivalent market exchange with redistribution based on power centers and a nonequivalent exchange with mutual aid using the Polanyi, Graeber, and Karatani modes of exchange. Two new exchange models based on multi-agent interactions are reconstructed following an econophysics approach for evaluating the Gini index (inequality) and total exchange (economic flow). Exchange simulations indicate that the evaluation parameter of the total exchange divi…
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