Welcome!

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at Vanderbilt University. My current research focuses on the dynamic aspects of collective decision-making under asymmetric information and the effects of decision-making institutions on political accountability and development.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Politics at Princeton University. I hold a PhD in Economics from Rice University and an MA in Economics from New Economic School.

Curriculum Vitae

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Publications

1. Equality in legislative bargaining Journal of Economic Theory, 2023

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   I study a distributive model of legislative bargaining in which the surplus generated by a winning coalition equals the sum of productivities of coalition members. The heterogeneous ability of players to generate surplus leads to asymmetric bargaining prospects in otherwise symmetric environments. More productive players are recruited more often by other players despite having higher expected payoffs; however, the players who are recruited in every coalition have equal expected payoffs despite having different productivity. I show that an increase in the required quota raises equality as measured by the Gini coefficient. The distribution of expected payoffs is more equal than the distribution of productivities but this advantage disappears under the less-than-unanimity voting as players become perfectly patient.

2. Dynamic legislative bargaining (with Hülya Eraslan and Jan Zápal) Bargaining: Current Research and Future Directions, 2022

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   This article surveys the theoretical literature on legislative bargaining with endogenous status-quo. These are the legislative bargaining situations in which in each period a new policy is decided and the policy implemented in the event of no agreement is endogenously determined by the outcome of bargaining in the previous period. After describing a general framework, we discuss bargaining over distributive policies, bargaining over spatial policies, existence issues, efficiency issues and open questions.

3. Uniqueness of equilibrium payoffs in the stochastic model of bargaining Economics Letters, 2020

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   I provide a sufficient condition for the uniqueness of equilibrium payoffs in a model of stochastic bargaining with unanimity rule and risk-averse players. My Condition (S) implies Condition (C) of Merlo and Wilson (1995) and is easy to verify in applications.

4. Legislative and multilateral bargaining (with Hülya Eraslan) Annual Review of Economics, 2019

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   This review of the theoretical literature on legislative and multilateral bargaining begins with presentation of the seminal Baron-Ferejohn model. The review then encompasses the extensions to bargaining among asymmetric players in terms of bargaining power, voting weights, and time and risk preferences; spatial bargaining; bargaining over a stochastic surplus; bargaining over public goods; legislative bargaining with alternative bargaining protocols in which players make demands, compete for recognition, or make counterproposals; and legislative bargaining with cheap talk communication.

Working papers

1. Multiplicity and uniqueness of stationary expected payoffs in coalitional bargaining Revised: April 2026

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   I study stationary expected payoffs in a random-proposer coalitional-bargaining model with transferable utility and a proposer-independent characteristic function that need not be monotone. I first show that proposer independence alone does not guarantee uniqueness: equilibrium delay can create a positive-feedback channel between continuation probabilities and continuation values that supports multiple payoff vectors. Then, focusing on primitives for which every equilibrium is no-delay, I characterize deterministic payoffs as zeros of a payoff-equation correspondence that is discontinuous at tie vectors. I introduce a logit perturbation of coalition choice and use topological degree to relate perturbed roots to deterministic roots. This yields a uniqueness theorem stated as a sufficient local sign condition, which I verify in an additive environment with convex size costs that allows non-monotone characteristic functions. The logit perturbation also provides a numerical approximation of deterministic expected payoffs.

2. Monopoly agenda control with privately informed voters

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   I investigate the ability to screen private information in a setting where the agenda-setter repeatedly proposes a spatial policy until some proposal is accepted by voters with distinct but correlated preferences who receive private signals about the common state. I show that the extent of screening ability depends on the relative precision of private signals and the conflict of preferences among voters, highlighting the crucial role of committee setting and single-peaked preferences. When the private signals have equal precision, the agenda-setter can achieve the full-information benchmark. When one voter receives an asymptotically more precise signal, the agenda-setter's ability to screen depends on preference diversity. These results imply that being able to make revised proposals can benefit the agenda-setter. Surprisingly, an increase in the voting threshold can allow the agenda-setter to extract more surplus in expectation.

3. Multilateral war of attrition with majority rule (with Hülya Eraslan and Mingzi Niu)

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   We analyze a multilateral war of attrition game with majority rule in continuous time. A chair and two competing players decide how to split one unit of surplus. Players have exogenously given demands that are incompatible. At each instance, the players simultaneously choose whether to concede or continue. The chair can concede to either of the two competing players, but the competing players can concede only to the chair. An agreement is reached when at least one player concedes. We characterize the equilibria of this game and establish the necessary and sufficient conditions under which equilibria with delay exist. In contrast to the bilateral case, delay equilibria are less likely and must involve an asymmetry: they exist only when the demands of the competing players are identical and sufficiently large, and only the chair can concede with a strictly positive probability at the start of the game. This has the surprising implication that the chair may be worse off when bargaining with two players under majority rule than with one who has veto power.

Work in progress

1. Single-subject rule in policy bargaining with asymmetric information
   When can institutional restrictions on decision-making benefit the agenda-setter by providing a coarse commitment device?

2. Information aggregation with monopoly agenda control
   What resolves the trade-off between the signaling and pivotal incentives in the information aggregation model with persistent agenda-setters?

3. Endogenous entry barriers and innovation (with Leonard Wantchekon)
   When are non-democracies better than democracies at removing barriers to education and innovation, and why the effects on economic growth are often temporary?

References