D82 - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
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Dynamic Privacy Choices
Consumers often express concerns about lack of privacy, but they still give up a lot of data to digital platforms. This paper builds a dynamic game-theoretic model of data collection and privacy protection, which potentially explains consumers’ behaviour. -
The Effects of Government Licensing on E-commerce: Evidence from Alibaba
How does government licensing affect selling on online platforms? We examine the impact of China’s 2015 Food Safety Law on sellers and buyers on Alibaba, the largest e-commerce platform in that country. -
Outside Investor Access to Top Management: Market Monitoring versus Stock Price Manipulation
Should managers be paid in stock options if they provide stock-market participants with information about the firm? This paper studies how firm owners trade off the benefit of stock-price incentives and better-informed market participants against the cost of potential stock-price manipulation. -
Optimal Taxation in Asset Markets with Adverse Selection
What is the optimal tax schedule in over-the-counter markets, e.g., those for corporate bonds? I find that an optimal tax schedule is often non-monotonic. For example, trading of some high-price assets should be subsidized, and trading of some low-price assets should be taxed. -
Online Privacy and Information Disclosure by Consumers
A consumer discloses information to a multi-product seller, which learns about the consumer’s preferences, sets prices, and makes product recommendations. While the consumer benefits from accurate product recommendations, the seller may use the information to price discriminate. -
Limiting Sender’s Information in Bayesian Persuasion
This paper studies how the outcome of Bayesian persuasion depends on a sender’s information. I study a game in which, prior to the sender’s information disclosure, the designer can restrict the most informative signal that the sender can generate. -
Inequality in Parental Transfers, Borrowing Constraints and Optimal Higher Education Subsidies
This paper studies optimal education subsidies when parental transfers are unequally distributed across students and cannot be publicly observed. After documenting substantial inequality in parental transfers among US college students with similar family resources, I examine its implications for how the education subsidy should vary with schooling level and family resources to minimize inefficiencies generated by borrowing constraints. -
Adverse Selection with Heterogeneously Informed Agents
A model of over-the-counter markets is proposed. Some asset buyers are informed in that they can identify high quality assets. Heterogeneous sellers with private information choose what type of buyers they want to trade with. -
Constrained Efficiency with Adverse Selection and Directed Search
Constrained efficient allocation (CE) is characterized in a model of adverse selection and directed search (Guerrieri, Shimer, and Wright (2010)). CE is defined to be the allocation that maximizes welfare, the ex-ante utility of all agents, subject to the frictions of the environment.