Essays in economic theory

Sinander, Carl Martin Ludvig

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-vh89-gq39

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Essays in economic theory

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This dissertation comprises three essays in distinct areas of economic theory. The first chapter is co-authored with Gregorio Curello. We identify a new and pervasive dynamic agency problem: that of incentivising the prompt disclosure of productive information. To study it, we introduce a model in which a technological breakthrough occurs at an uncertain time and is privately observed by an agent, and a principal must incentivise disclosure via her control of the agent's utility. We uncover a striking deadline structure of optimal mechanisms: they have a simple deadline form in an important special case, and a graduated deadline structure in general. We apply our results to the design of unemployment insurance schemes. In the second chapter, I prove an envelope theorem with a converse: the envelope formula is equivalent to a first-order condition. Like Milgrom and Segal's (2002) envelope theorem, my result requires no structure on the choice set. I use the converse envelope theorem to extend to abstract outcomes the canonical result in mechanism design that any increasing allocation is implementable, and apply this to selling information. The final chapter, also co-authored with Gregorio Curello, concerns collective decision-making. A committee ranks a set of alternatives by sequentially voting on pairs, in an order chosen by the committee's chair. Although the chair has no knowledge of voters' preferences, we show that she can do as well as if she had perfect information. We characterise strategies with this 'regret-freeness' property in two ways: (1) they are efficient, and (2) they avoid two intuitive errors. One regret-free strategy is a sorting algorithm called insertion sort. We show that it is characterised by a lexicographic property, and is outcome-equivalent to a recursive variant of the much-studied amendment procedure.

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