Research

A list of papers, with a touch of the central messages, is below. Click through the links for a PDF of the paper. 

Working Papers

1. Procrastination and Commitment   [Slides   Online Appendix]   Revise & Resubmit, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

A tractable model of procrastination: for a present-biased agent, although full commitment can strictly enhance welfare, partial commitment—in the sense that the agent cannot always commit her actions when she gets to make a move—is nevertheless harmful. This is because procrastination is exacerbated in unregulated times as an unintended consequence, neutralizing the benefit of commitment.

2. Signaling Design with Matteo Camboni, Mallesh M. Pai, and Rakesh Vohra

A departure from the signaling model of Spence (1973) that endogenizes the signaling options available in the market:  competition among profit-seeking signaling intermediaries induces wasteful effort—contrasting with the usual argument that competition enhances social efficiency—and a surplus transfer from intermediary to candidates. This is because intermediaries vie to attract high-ability candidates by providing more informative signals about abilities with lower fees. 

3. Motivated Misperception   [Slides]

I propose a model of expectation management to study how an interactive environment breeds and perpetuates a certain type of misperception. This paper provides a novel approach to incentivize effort (perception manipulation), complementary to the usual monetary or informational incentives studied in principal-agent theory. It endogenizes model misspecification in the literature of misspecified learning in a principal-agent framework and can be applied to a wide range of interactions such as mentor-mentee, parent-child, self-manipulation, and emotional abuse in professional or intimate relationships.

4. Multilateral War of Attrition with Majority Rule  with Hülya Eraslan and Kirill S. Evdokimov   [Slides]

In multilateral bargaining with majority rule, a reputation for being stubborn can harm the player's chances of being included in the first place. In this paper, we study a three-player concession game in which only two players, including a veto player (the chair), are needed to reach an agreement on how to split a unit of surplus. In contrast to the bilateral case, delay equilibria are less likely to occur; however, conditional on delay, the chair may be worse off when bargaining with two players instead of only one player.

5. Trust or Stigmatization? Evidence From De-Anonymizing Social Media in China with Yiqian Wang and Ziang Xiao; new draft coming soon!

Anonymity protects the freedom of speech whereas burgeoning misinformation from anonymous sources urge platforms to practice  identity transparency.  Leveraging recent Chinese social media regulations and text analysis advancements, we find that reduced anonymity substantially decreases politically marginalized groups' representation. We motivate our empirical results using a theoretical framework and investigate how the intergroup gap in media biases affects participation in social media. Our findings highlight that, under media biases, identity transparency intensifies political polarization.

Papers in Refereed Conference Proceedings

• Best vs. All: Equity and Accuracy of Standardized Test Score Reporting with Sampath Kannan, Aaron Roth, and Rakesh Vohra

FAccT'22: 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency,  574–586   [PDF   Slides   Poster]

This paper emphasizes a source of unfairness that arises from the fact that only some applicants have the resources to take standardized tests multiple times. We find that, compared to super-scoring, requiring that all scores be reported results in superior equilibrium outcomes in admission accuracy and equity across populations. This is the case even though the more highly resourced students can—at their option—either report a more accurate signal of their type, or pool with the lower resourced population under this policy. The study represents an unusual situation where the goals of accuracy and equity are in alignment.

Other Publications

• SIGecom Winter Meeting 2022 Highlights (with Emily Diana and Georgy Noarov), ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 20(1), Nov 2022.   [PDF]

Working in Progress

1. Zero-Cost Refinancing and Present Bias  with Yunbo Liu

How does present bias affect households' refinancing decisions? We first characterize the closed-form solution of the optimal refinancing threshold for present-biased households, and then use the data of U.S. mortgage refinance choices and matched household demographics to explain refinancing inaction that was not captured well in classic models.

Dormant Projects

• Gaming in Zero-Knowledge Proof System

How to incorporate the notion of Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) in cryptography into economics? Loosely speaking, ZKP requires the interactions between a prover and a verifier that yield no extra information other than the validation of the claim. It guarantees data privacy and information safety in a decentralized economic system, especially with the technology of blockchain.  

• Screening with Delegated Learning

A principal needs to delegate information collection to agents, and agents differ in their privately known ability of information acquisition. What is the optimal approval mechanism for the principal to make the right decision? Is it better to let the principal specify the information collection regime (e.g., when to report)  or allow the agent, who has the information advantage, to have the discretion?

Grants

I am currently supported by the Azrieli Foundation as an international postdoctoral fellow in the academic year 2024-2025.

Services

I've been a referee for:  Economics Letters, Games and Economic Behavior, International Economic Review, International Journal of Game Theory, Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of Mathematical Economics, and Review of Economic Design, Social Choice and Welfare.