Recent Publications and Working Papers:

Little Firms and Big Patents (JEMS 2008) (Slides) Patent strategies of small technology-intensive firms are difficult to explain with standard incentive arguments based on intellectual property rights. This paper develops a rationale for patent filing as a disclosure strategy. We develop a two-sender signaling game to study patenting incentives of two technology start-ups to file in a large-scale patent system with the goal to attract a user firm. Both start-ups may decide to invest in costly modification of their patent application before filing. The paper identifies a separating equilibrium in which the high-quality inventor files and so separates from its technology competitor. Of particular interest is the study of pooling and semi-separating equilibria, as well as the impact of subsidies. We find that a higher quality of a country’s inventions, reflected in the possible innovative steps and thus in higher expected profits for foreign user firms, may increase the chance of the relatively lower quality inventor to enter international technology markets.

Delegated Contracting, Information, and Internal Control, Economics Letters, 2008. (Slides).

This paper studies a particular form of internal control available to a (top) principal when delegating the offer of a Baron–Myerson style contract to an intermediary.We show that by examining the contract offered to the productive agent, the principal can reduce the loss of control.

Two-Sender Cheap Talk in One Dimension (Slides)

We study interval cheap talk with multiple senders that observe a possibly noisy signal over the same one-dimensional state space. Specifically, we characterize an equilibrium for the economically interesting case of one-sided or "like" biases in which an uninformed receiver extracts more information from two senders compared to playing the Crawford-Sobel (1982) "best equilibrium" with the less biased sender only. We furthermore compare fully revealing equilibria with partitional equilibria, to reach some new findings that are of use for the design of practically feasible game forms. While fully revealing equilibria with two senders are not robust under noise, the proposed partitional equilibrium survives the perturbation. The paper illustrates the value of partitional equilibria for game forms used in economic environments in which the receiver is able to extract more information from multiple senders that observe a signal over the same state space. (mimeo, 9/2009)

Contracting for Quality and Platform Market Design (Slides)

This paper analyzes the market design options of a platform player facing consumers that care for high-quality applications running on the platform. We model a contracting game with adverse selection and moral hazard and three players: a platform (market designer), a group of consumers, and a developer (agent) who can be of two quality types. We characterize a contract in which consumers delegate the design of the contract to the platform player who because of the features of his platform can control the effort of the developer toward quality. Extensions include related benchmarks in which the developer designs the market herself, royalties paid to the platform, and the options of consumers to bypass the platform if development costs are too high. The paper so adds a new view into market design options when consumers have preferences toward the quality of applications. (mimeo, 9/2009)

Created 9/2009.

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