Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Halac, Marina

Abstract

My dissertation examines the role of information acquisition and other frictions in bargaining and contracting settings. Chapter 1 studies an informal common value auction where a seller controls buyers' access to costly information. It shows that allowing the winning bidder to acquire information after bidding, i.e., via due diligence, maximizes the seller’s worst-case payoff when stakes are sufficiently high. Chapter 2 analyzes competition between firms selling a homogeneous good to a rationally inattentive consumer. It identifies an attention effect, whereby competition increases trade engagement. As a result, firms’ aggregate profits are increasing in the number of active firms when attention is sufficiently costly. Chapter 3 investigates optimal monitoring and compensation in multi-agent contracting with a limited message space. It finds that, in such settings, the principal optimally misaligns workers’ incentives. Chapter 4 examines redistributive bargaining when an affected third party has the possibility to protest. It demonstrates that strategic delay allows the bargainers to extract more surplus without provoking protests, but only when their interests are misaligned.

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