PhD Candidate in Business Economics, Department of Management, LSE
Contact details
Email: z.chen16@lse.ac.uk
Phone number: +44 (0)75 9935 6002
Room number: 3.09 NAB
Address: Department of Management || London School of Economics and Political Science || Houghton Street || London WC2A 2AE
Research interests
Primary Fields: Micreconomic Theory || Behavioural and Experimental Economics || Political Economy
Secondary Fields: Organisation Economics || Behavioural Finance
Job Market Paper
Spying in Contests
Abstract
Two players compete for a prize and their valuations are private information. Before the contest, each player can covertly acquire a costly, noisy and private signal regarding the opponent's valuation. In equilibrium, each player's effort in the contest is non-decreasing (non-increasing) in the posterior probability that the opponent has the same (a different) valuation. Accounting for the cost of spying, players are strictly better off than not spying on each other at all. Suppose instead that without incurring any cost to any player, each player can ex ante commit to disclose a signal about her valuation to the opponent, but cannot observe realizations of the signal. Then there does not exist any equilibrium in which both players disclose an informative signal to the opponent, even though doing so would benefit both players.
Publications and Additional Papers
"The Gender Difference in the Value of Winning", with David Ong and Roman Sheremeta, Economics Letters, 2015, 137, 226-229.
“Heterogeneous Risk/Lose Aversion in Complete Information All-pay Auction”, with David Ong and Ella Segev, R&R at European Economic Review.
“Persistent Bias in Advice-giving”, with Tobias Gesche.
“Information Disclosure in Contests: Private vs. Public Signals”.
“Competition between and within Universities: Theoretical and Experimental Investigation of Group Identity and the Desire to Win", with David Ong and Roman Sheremeta, submitted.
Work in progress
“Bidding under the Illusion of Transparency”, with Kristof Madarasz.