Working Papers
Application Costs as a Screening Instrument in Decentralized Matching
We consider decentralized matching in a two-sided market of employers and employees (universities and students) with application costs and limited budgets. Students choose whether they should take the risk of applying to more prestigious school (with some probability of rejection) or make a safe choice. We show that application costs set by universities may be treated as a screening instrument in order to attract only strong students or to avoid the competition. Also, we find conditions for equilibria when costs are negligible, costs are a substantial part of the budget or even the entire budget, in addition to other equilibria.
Decentralized Dynamic Matching with Signaling
We consider multi-period decentralized matching in a two-sided market of employers and employees. Because of dynamics, asymmetry, and private information, we always observe delays and coordination failures with nonzero probability even in a simple case of two agents from each side. For this, we obtain conditions for different strategies to be in equilibrium. We show that problems of miscoordination and delay may be solved by signaling or by incentivizing immediate response that turn a dynamic problem into a static one and make the matching stable. In the general case, we obtain sufficient conditions for assortative matching to be and not to be in equilibrium.
Iterated Regret Minimization in Games with Nonoptimal Nash Equilibria
The concept of iterated regret minimization (IRM) provides solutions that are more reasonable than ones offered by Nash equilibrium (NE) for many games of interest, such as the Traveler's Dilemma, the Centipede Game, and many others. For them, we analyzed new data — the IRM approach prescribes the most profitable strategy better than NE. Also, we apply the IRM to the games with continuous strategy sets, such as Colonel Blotto game and Bertrand-Edgeworth duopoly, and obtain reasonable pricing and allocating policies.
Work in Progress
The Optimal Policy of Storages in Electricity Markets (with Guillaume Roger)
We consider a dynamic market with demand shocks where some participants (storages) can both buy and sell assets up to their capacity. We find the entry and equilibrium conditions for this market and describe the optimal behavior of a storage with and without interventions of a market operator. It turns out that the storage's policy may change significantly for different shocks and capacity values. This understanding is crucial in the light of emerging new powerful storages on the National Electricity Market of Australia.
Information Flows on Network Structures (with Dan Levin and Jaromir Kovarik)
We study how the structure of a network in terms of number of agents, feasible actions, and absorbability of actions of others affects the agent's trade-off between the incentive to delay actions in order to infer information by observing actions of others and the incentive to move early to avoid costs of delay.
Congestion on the Bottom: Matching with Limited Capacity
We consider decentralized matching in a two-sided market of employers and employees, where each side has two types of agents, high and low. With limited capacity of employers and if both employees' types are weak enough, we observe an interesting result: in order to avoid competition with high-type employees, low-type employees send applications to high-type employers.