Efficient Communication in Organizations - job market paper - submitted

Organizations design their communication structures to improve decision-making while limiting wasteful influence activities. A communication protocol is efficient if it grants all members of the organization their complete information payoffs, thereby overcoming asymmetric information problems at no cost. This paper characterizes efficient protocols assuming that (i) some agents within the organization have the knowledge required for optimal decision-making; (ii) both the organization and consulted agents incur losses that are proportional to the exerted influence activities; and (iii) informed agents can discuss their strategies before being consulted. Under these assumptions, ``sequential advocacy'' is the unique efficient communication protocol. This result provides a rationale for sequential advocacy.

Competition in Signaling - 2nd R&R at the Journal of Economic Theory

I study a multi-sender signaling game between an uninformed decision maker and two senders with common private information and conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that is increasing in the size of the misrepresentation. The main results concern the equilibrium amount of transmitted information and the language used by senders to convey such information. Neither babbling nor truthful equilibria exist. Fully revealing and pure-strategy equilibria exist but are not robust. I identify sufficient conditions under which equilibria always exist, are essentially unique, and robust. A complete characterization of these equilibria shows that information transmission is qualitatively different from that obtained in related communication models with a single sender or without misreporting costs.

Influential News and Policy-making - forthcoming, Economic Theory

This paper analyzes the implications of those types of interventions that affect misreporting costs. I study a model of communication between an uninformed voter and a media outlet that knows the quality of two competing candidates. The alternatives available to the voter are endogenously championed by the two candidates. I show that higher costs may lead to more misreporting and persuasion, whereas low costs result in full revelation. Yet, interventions that increase misreporting costs never directly harm the voter, but those that do so slightly can be wasteful of public resources. Regulation produced by politicians leads to suboptimal interventions

Welfare in Experimental News Markets  (joint with Andrea Albertazzi and Matteo Ploner) - submitted

We perform a controlled experiment to study the welfare effects of competition in a strategic communication environment. Two equally informed senders with conflicting interests can misreport information at a cost. We compare a treatment where only one sender communicates to a treatment where both senders privately communicate with a decision-maker. Data show that competition between senders does not increase the amount of information decision-makers obtain. We find evidence of under-communication, as the information transmitted is lower than what theory predicts in the most informative equilibrium. Senders are worse off under competition because their relative gains from persuasion are more than offset by their expenditures in misreporting costs. As a result, competition between senders reduces the total welfare.

Work in Progress

Direct Competition in the News Market

Bureaucrats Meddling with Accountability (joint with Christos Mavridis and Simon Lodato)

Competing Pools (joint with Yair Antler and Santiago Oliveros)