Selected Works and Working Papers.
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1. Reasons for Peace:I propose a stylized reputational bargaining model of war where two combatants split a surplus while they fight. Although fighting allocates resources, it inflicts significant and unequal costs and can destroy both the surplus and the means through which offers are exchanged. Combatants may also enter war due to non-strategic motives, such as vengeance or ethnic tensions, leading to inflexible demands. The model has a unique equilibrium explaining key trends in modern warfare. From the outset, the weaker combatant concedes to avoid conflict. If not, a war-of-attrition ensues until rare, battlefield information arrives. Upon its arrival, one side concedes immediately, or a renewed war-of-attrition follows with different concession dynamics. The model further predicts a partial and inverse relation between military and bargaining power. Lastly, the model suggests that ceasefire-like policies increase the ex-ante probability of war and prolongs armed conflicts. These predictions are further tested using a detailed panel of wars which occurred over the last 200 years.
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2. Optimal Sequential Experimentation: I study a sequential experimentation problem where a decision-maker (DM) learns about competing alternatives by managing an experiment i.e., a noisy data-generation process. Extending the widely used Drift-Diffusion (DD) framework, I allow for a broad spectrum of evidence-generation strategies: from continuous updates to rare, decisive signals. Despite this added flexibility, I find that the unique, optimal strategy remains feasible in the DD framework, as experimental constraints compel gradual evidence accumulation. This finding challenges recent results suggesting a preference for infrequent, decisive evidence under flexible learning. The model's generality captures diverse applications, from R&D and due diligence to policymaking, where balancing precision, speed, and evidentiary flow is crucial. I further propose a novel experimental design to test cognitive cost structures and clarify when outsourcing experimentation to consultants is optimal.
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3. The Game of Snake (Upcoming, latest research (early stage), slides available here): Technological progress is key to wealth generation and nations, consequently, invest heavily in research and development (R& D). Over time, however, the direction of research is increasingly narrow and unresponsive to new findings (Park et al 2023): thus, technological progress stalls. In this paper, I rationalize the trends above when a scientist's skills are valued outside of R&D and, in discovery, there are overall agglomeration gains. This is because new discoveries increases non-research productivity and thus its wages. Over time, rising, non-research wages prompts increasing concentration in scientific topics with decreasing social and private value.
4. Learning to Commit: I study the relation between limited commitment and learning in auctions. In each period, the seller sets the terms for an auction selling an indivisible good among multiple buyers; but if the item fails to sell, he cannot pre-commit to the terms of future offerings. I find that, in interdependent value settings, the seller's equilibrium revenues are greater than immediately running an efficient, Vickrey auction. In contrast with private value settings, this result persists regardless of how often the seller may interact with buyers. This is because learning among buyers both limits how many times a good can be gainfully re-offered and the information rents that each buyer can demand the seller. Intuitively, buyers lower their valuations in response to their peer's lack of interest. This progressively lowers the trade surplus and compresses the support of valuations. As the dispersion in valuations falls, the seller further extracts an increasing share of the remaining trade surplus.
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