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 bargaining power.

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. Committee transparency and full surplus extraction Revised: May 2026

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   I study repeated bargaining between an uninformed agenda-setter and a transparent committee whose members observe the common state. The agenda-setter makes proposals until one receives the required number of votes, and the individual voting record is observed after every rejected proposal. I show that, in the patient limit, transparent voting can support extraction of the complete-information surplus from the decisive member even though the agenda-setter lacks commitment. In trade committees, transparency allows the agenda-setter to distinguish a low-state rejection profile from any unilateral high-state rejection. Policy and mixed committees show that the transparent-voting construction is not tied to decreasing trade payoffs. Delegation and opaque-voting benchmarks remain below the complete-information payoff, showing that both collective veto power and individual voting records matter.

   (This paper supersedes "Monopoly agenda control with privately informed voters.")

2. Multiplicity and uniqueness of stationary expected payoffs in coalitional bargaining Revised: October 2026

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   I study uniqueness of stationary expected payoffs in random-proposer coalitional bargaining with transferable utility. Proposer independence of coalition surplus does not guarantee uniqueness, even when the surplus is strictly monotone and every equilibrium features immediate agreement. For M^♮-concave characteristic functions, including non-monotone ones, I show that stationary expected payoffs are unique and continuous in the primitives, provided that every equilibrium features immediate agreement. To prove uniqueness, I identify an equitable grouping property of maximizing coalitions and show that M^♮-concavity implies it at every no-delay candidate payoff vector. Using equitable grouping, I show that every no-delay equilibrium payoff vector is isolated and has positive local index. For parameter changes that preserve immediate agreement in every equilibrium, a uniform increase in a player's contribution to every coalition containing her strictly increases her expected payoff, while an increase in her discount factor weakly increases it. I apply these results to joint ventures with coordination costs and government formation with ministerial expertise.

3. Standoffs with intertwined resolve and public information February 2026 (with Hülya Eraslan and Mingzi Niu)

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   Conventional wisdom, dating back to Schelling and formalized by Crawford (1982), regards commitment as a valuable bargaining tool despite the risk of impasse. More recently, Kambe (1999) showed that delays caused by reputation building discourage negotiators from making incompatible demands. We highlight two factors that influence the tradeoff between the costs and benefits of commitment attempts: a correlation in their successes and public signals about the resolve of negotiators. We show that negotiators make incompatible demands when the correlation is sufficiently negative or the public signal is sufficiently precise, helping to explain common behavior in political negotiations and collective bargaining.

4. 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.

References