Publications

Signaling with Private Monitoring

Gonzalo Cisternas and Aaron Kolb
The Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
PDF   Supplementary Appendix   Code: spm.nb  

Consumer Scores and Price Discrimination

Alessandro Bonatti, Gonzalo Cisternas
The Review of Economic Studies, 87(2), 750–791, 2020
PDF   Slides   Online Article   Supplementary Appendix   Code: scores.nb  

[expand title="Description"]Data about consumers’ past behavior carries information about unobserved willingness to pay and is compressed into statistics that are then used by firms to price discriminate. I evaluate the extent to which strategic consumers can benefit from this data collection via manipulating firms’ beliefs, uncovering a novel economic mechanism that explains why transparency in data collection can be key.[/expand]

Career Concerns and the Nature of Skills

Gonzalo Cisternas
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 10(2), 152-89, 2018
PDF   Online Article   Media: AEA Research Highlights

[expand title="Description"]Workers want to be perceived as skilled. To which extent such reputational motives incentivize good performance? Whether skills are endogenous or not matters when employers gradually learn about unobserved skills from performance.[/expand]

Two-Sided Learning and the Ratchet Principle

Gonzalo Cisternas
The Review of Economic Studies, 85(1), 307–351, 2018
PDF   Slides   Online Article  

[expand title="Description"]What are the forces that shape strategic behavior in settings where everyone is roughly equally uninformed about `fundamental’ variables? Attempting to manipulate beliefs comes at the cost of higher expectations of performance from one’s perspective. This paper develops a surprising ODE-method that dramatically simplifies the analysis of settings in which the reputational benefits are nonlinear.[/expand]

Dynamic Oligopoly with Incomplete Information

Alessandro Bonatti, Gonzalo Cisternas, Juuso Toikka
The Review of Economic Studies, 84(2), 503–546, 2017
PDF   Slides   Online Article  

[expand title="Description"]A new market in which firms do not know the costs of their rivals and prices are noisy opens up - how does competition for market leadership unfold? Firms’ attempt to be perceived as low cost -- and thus induce rivals to scale back -- leads to substantial overproduction and low prices. Despite this rat-race, however, the industry can be better off for prolonged periods of its midlife.[/expand]

Sequential Procurement Auctions and Their Effect on Investment Decisions

Gonzalo Cisternas, Nicolas Figueroa
RAND Journal of Economics, 46, 824-843, 2015
PDF   Slides   Online Article  

[expand title="Description"]Can firms and governments design purchasing mechanisms that control costs from both a short and a long-term perspective? Optimal advantages to past winners play a dual role: they incentivize fierce competition by suppliers in the short run, and also induce strong incentives to invest in cost reductions by winners.[/expand]

Working Papers

Activist Trading Dynamics

Doruk Cetemen, Gonzalo Cisternas, Aaron Kolb and S. Viswanathan
07/2023 version
PDF  

Misinformation in Social Media: The Role of Verification Incentives

Gonzalo Cisternas and Jorge Vasquez
R&R Journal of the European Economic Association
PDF  

[expand title="Description"]A flexible framework akin to traditional supply and demand through which the creation and diffusion of fake news in social media platforms, as well as the effectiveness of policies intended to curtail misinformation, can be examined. Lowering verification costs borne by users and introducing internal detection algorithms may not work as expected.[/expand]

A Note on the Comparative Statics of Optimal Procurement Auctions

Gonzalo Cisternas and Nicolás Figueroa
PDF  

[expand title="Description"]In a procurement context, under which conditions can a buyer benefit from facing a better potential supplier that has private information about its costs? Will more efficient technologies translate to higher profits for any such a supplier? [/expand]