Research

I am mostly interested in applied microeconomic theory, with current work on the relationship between information provision and networks; however, my wider interests spread to political economy, game theory and conflict.

Click on the titles below for the latest versions of my working papers!

Working papers

• 4 Things Nobody Tells you About Online News: a Model for the New News Market [JMP]
  Social media create a new type of incentives for news producers. Consumers share content, influence the visibility of articles and determine the advertisement revenues ensuing. I study the new incentives created by sharing and evaluate the potential quality of ad-funded online news. Producers rely on a subset of rational and unbiased consumers to spread news articles. The resulting news has low precision and ambiguous welfare effects. Producers’ incentive to invest in news quality increases with the private knowledge of the topic; hence, when information is most needed, the generated news tends to be of lesser quality. Competition does not necessarily improve news quality – it does so only if the sharing network is sufficiently dense. While ad-funded online news occasionally helps consumers take better decisions, it creates welfare mostly through entertainment. Some interventions, such as flagging wrong articles, substantially improve the outcome; other approaches, such as quality certification, do not.
  

• Persuasion in Networks: a Model with Heterogenous Agents
  This paper studies a Bayesian persuasion problem in a connected world. A sender wants to induce receivers to take some actions by committing to a signal structure about a payoff-relevant state. I wonder about the role of a network on information provision when signals are shared among neighbors. Receivers differ in their prior beliefs; the sender wants to persuade some receivers without dissuading the others. I present and characterize novel strategies through which the network is exploited. Were receivers’ priors homogenous, such strategies would underperform with respect to a public signal. However, when priors are heterogenous, these strategies can prove useful to the sender. In particular, if the average degree of the nodes who should not be dissuaded is sufficiently low, strategies exploiting the network convince more receivers than public signals, conditional on the adverse state realizing. Furthermore, I show how connectivity can be beneficial to the sender, in particular in segregated networks; and how strategies exploiting the network perform better when one group is especially hard to persuade.
  

• When Conflict is a Political Strategy: A Model of Diversionary Incentives
  This model revisits the diversionary argument of war by proposing a new mechanism: a population that rebels during a conflict weakens the country’s military position; this threat discourages the population to attempt a coup. Being at war thus allows a leader to impose demanding policies without being overthrown. In this context, I show how “rally around the flag” reactions to conflict can be both rational and efficient. I further prove that purely diversionary incentives exist: international tensions can be initiated with the only goal of raising popular support about the conflict. Finally, I discuss long-run effects, by allowing rebellion means to be flexible. I find that the population can voluntarily renounce to the freedom to rebel; alternatively, conflicts occur in equilibrium. The strength of the enemy’s threat increases the prevalence of barriers to rebellion, while open conflicts are non-monotonically linked to it.

Work in progress

• The No-Substitution Curse (with Massimo Morelli)

• The Formation of Gas Provision Networks (with Massimo Morelli)
  

• A Key Player Analysis with Heterogenous Catching Costs (with Magdalena Domínguez)
  

• Be Right, or Be Conform: Learning with Information Avoidance