Signaling with Private Monitoring

Consumer Scores and Price Discrimination

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]