Working Papers

Contesting Fake News

We model competition on a credence goods market governed by an imperfect label, signaling high quality, as a rank-order tournament between firms. In this market interaction, asymmetric firms jointly and competitively control the aggregate precision of a label ranking the competitors‘ qualities by releasing individual information. While the labels and the aggregated information they are based on can be seen as a public good guiding the consumers‘ purchasing decisions, individual firms have incentives to strategically amplify or counteract the competitors‘ information emission, thereby manipulating the aggregate precision of product labeling, i.e., the underlying ranking’s discriminatory power. Elements of the introduced theory are applicable to several (credence-good) industries that employ labels or rankings, including academic departments, „green“ certification, movies, and investment opportunities.

with Beatrice Roussillon & Paul Schweinzer
Download by clicking here
(version from Sep 1, 2025)
arXiv Working Paper

Choose Your Auction:
Mechanism design for a bidder

This paper addresses a novel auction design problem aimed at maximizing a bidder’s utility by selecting auction rules tailored to the bidder’s value. Focusing on non-discriminatory auctions, the study aligns with EU and WTO guidelines against direct discrimination, thereby ensuring fairness. The analysis reveals that for any bidder’s value, the preferred auction is a second-price auction with pooling, where the seller commits not to differentiate between bids within certain value regions. We demonstrate that the preferred auction changes „continuously“ with the bidder’s value. Notably, the preferred auction does not distinguish between certain bids to soften competition even when the target bidder’s value is high. Additionally, the study explores auction design with more relaxed or more strict constraints that could be encountered in practice, such as permitting positive transfers to bidders or prohibiting stochastic allocations.

with Dmitriy Knyazev
Download by clicking here
(version from Sep 1, 2025)
SSRN Working Paper