About Me


(Job Market Paper) Version: April 2025

Abstract

Games with strategic complementarities often exhibit multiple equilibria. In a global game, players privately observe a noisy signal of the underlying payoff matrix. As the noise diminishes, a unique equilibrium is selected in almost all binary-action games with strategic complementarities – a property known as “limit uniqueness.” This paper describes the limits of that approach in two-player games, as we move beyond two actions. Unlike binary-action games, limit uniqueness is not an intrinsic feature of all games with strategic complementarities. When the noise is symmetric, we demonstrate that limit uniqueness holds if and only if the payoffs exhibit a generalized ordinal potential property. Moreover, we provide an example illustrating how this condition can be easily violated.

(with O. Gossner) Version: November 2024

Characterizing Information Design for Rationalizability in all finite games with incomplete information: Any outcome can be implemented with an information structure consisting of a common state and additive, idiosyncratic noise.

Idea: Represent every common prior as a Markov chain on best-replies.

Abstract

We study (interim correlated) rationalizability in games with incomplete information. For each given game, we show that a simple and finitely parameterized class of information structures is sufficient to generate every outcome distribution induced by general common prior information structures. In this parameterized family, players observe signals of two kinds: A finite signal and a common state with additive, idiosyncratic noise. We characterize the set of rationalizable outcomes of a given game as a convex polyhedron.

(with S. Morris and D. Bergemann) Version: April 2025

For any information structure, there is a finite information structure whose (approximate) equilibrium outcomes are close in all finite games.

Idea: Use the product topology on hierarchies and add common belief restrictions as done in previous works.

Abstract

Two information structures are said to be close if, with high probability, there is approximate common knowledge that interim beliefs are close under the two information structures. We define an “almost common knowledge topology” reflecting this notion of closeness. We show that it is the coarsest topology generating continuity of equilibrium outcomes. An information structure is said to be simple if each player has a finite set of types and each type has a distinct first-order belief about payoff states. We show that simple information structures are dense in the almost common knowledge topology and thus it is without loss to restrict attention to simple information structures in information design problems.

(with O. Gossner) Version: November 2024

A strategic foundation for information: in any given game with incomplete information we define strategic quotients as information representations that are sufficient for players to compute best-responses to other players.

Version: April 2025

Investors aggregate their private information prior to playing an investment game with strategic complementarities by trading a token and observing its market price.

Idea: Encode private information into the prime factorization of the market price.

Abstract

In this short note, we describe an information aggregation mechanism that can be used by players before playing a game of strategic complementarities under incomplete information. In such a game, players may have an incentive to share overly optimistic information with others, thereby inducing them to take higher actions. In this mechanism, players trade a token before playing the game. Players who wish to communicate good news must purchase this worthless token and burn resources. The note shows that players only need to observe the market-clearing price that arises from the token trades to aggregate their private information. Each element in a player’s private information set is encoded as a prime number in the prime factorization of the market-clearing price. The element contained in every player’s information set is identified as the prime with the highest multiplicity.

Welfare and Robustness in Matching and Information Design

Highlighting the trade-off between welfare and robustness in the joint problem of matching and information design, under private information for decentralized financial markets.