Research

My research is in the area of behavioral Microeconomic theory. In particular, my research agenda focuses on sequential games of imperfect information. I study settings in which not only do agents face imperfect information in the traditional sense of not possessing all payoff-relevant information, but they also face uncertainty about their position of movement in the sequence. I have utilized this framework to study financial investment decisions by individuals, production decisions by firms, and implications on information aggregation in observational learning.

Job Market Paper

The role of confidence over timing of investment information

I present an investment environment wherein investors demand an asset based on perfectly informative signals, but face uncertainty about the timing of their information acquisition. I show that this reduces the demand and price for every period but that in the limit price as number of periods increases price converges to the true value of the asset. By introducing a concept of confidence over the time in which they receive a signal, I show that the impact of uncertainty can be exaggerated in either a negative or positive direction, with the limit price reflecting the true value of the asset depending on the type of confidence under consideration.

Working Papers

Sequential quantity setting under positional uncertainty

In a Stackelberg oligopoly setting two firms set quantity without knowing whether they are the first or second in the market. I find that with a common prior positional uncertainty always leads to a more competitive level of quantity. This finding is exacerbated when firms do not share a common prior and the sum of their prior beliefs of moving first exceeds unity. Even in the presence of a common prior and many identical firms as the number of firms increases the equilibrium quantity in the presence of positional uncertainty can exceed that of perfect competition.

Social learning with limited histories

I adapt the standard observational learning environment and introduce a limited history of observation. When agents can only observe the action of the previous agent, complete learning still occurs but with a loss of welfare. When a limited history is coupled with uncertainty over position in the queue of actors, welfare further drops - increasing in uncertainty - but complete learning still occurs in the limit. These results are illustrated with a canonical linear model but learning holds in a more general setting satisfying the usual social learning assumptions.