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Essays in Information Economics.

紀錄類型:	書目-電子資源 : Monograph/item
正題名/作者:	Essays in Information Economics./
作者:	Lou, Yichuan.
出版者:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2021,
面頁冊數:	109 p.
附註:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 83-02, Section: B.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International83-02B.
標題:	Information science. -
電子資源:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=28410557
ISBN:	9798534676556

Essays in Information Economics.
Lou, Yichuan.

Essays in Information Economics. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2021 - 109 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 83-02, Section: B.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2021.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

This dissertation consists of two chapters, each of them containing an essay that is related to information economics, either through the design of information policies or in cheap-talk communication settings.The first chapter, "Information Management in the Theory of Delegation," explores how to influence behavior by simultaneously restricting discretion (the delegation problem) and restricting information (the information design problem). My motivation is to understand to what extent a combination of these two tools can properly align a biased individual's incentives, and consequently influence decision-making. To study this problem, I introduce a principal-agent model in which a principal jointly commits to a delegation rule (i.e., specifying a permissible set of actions from which a biased agent can choose), and an information rule (i.e., limiting the information sources the agent has access to). My paper has two main results. First, the principal's and the agent's incentives are fully aligned under the optimal joint delegation and information rules. In particular, subject to the constraints on discretion and information, the agent plays exactly as the principal would want him to. Second, the optimal information rule takes on a monotone partitional structure: the principal introduces noise into the information structure by letting the agent observe only which partition element the true state actually lies in. Given the information he receives, the agent then chooses from the delegation set an action that best serves his interests. I then apply the results to the regulation of a monopolist (agent) who collects consumer-specific data and use it to estimate the underlying demand and determine the profit-maximizing price. Here the monopolist's pricing problem is essentially a problem of third-degree pricing discrimination, where different realizations of demand information play the role of market segments. The welfare-maximizing regulator (principal) can restrict the set of prices available to the monopolist (price regulation), and additionally restrict the use of consumer data for demand estimation and differential pricing (privacy protection). My main results thus directly apply and show that the optimal joint regulatory policies feature a finite set of permissible prices and a finite market segmentation. As a result, given a consumer, the monopolist can identify which market segment the consumer belongs to, and then choose his preferred price from the finite price set. Two findings can be made as follows. First, with the introduction of privacy protection, the optimal price regulation takes the form of a finite set of prices, as opposed to the optimality of price-cap regulation (as an interval) in the full-information benchmark. Second, privacy protection is effective only when it is used along with price regulation, and strikingly, it can also raise the monopolist's profit when the overall elasticity of consumer demand is moderately low. This implies that privacy protection has the potential to induce Pareto improvements in the problem of price regulation.In the second chapter, "Credible Persuasion," I tackle the following question: What private information should a sender possess in order to facilitate his communication with a receiver? I consider a model of persuasion where a sender publicly acquires private information (a signal) before engaging in a cheap-talk game with a receiver. The sender-optimal signal exploits the following trade-off: although better-quality information allows the sender to communicate more precisely, it adversely affects the credibility of the sender's messages. I establish a general no-concealment principle according to which any feasible sender payoff can be attained with a signal that induces full communication in the cheap-talk game. I show under further conditions the sender can use a menu of bi-pooling signals: it partitions the states into intervals such that, in each interval, either all states are pooled into the same signal, or two different signals are sent for states in that interval. Finally, I use the model to discuss how the endogeneity of information asymmetry can affect the trade-off between delegation and communication.

ISBN: 9798534676556Subjects--Topical Terms:

554358
Information science.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Communication

Essays in Information Economics.
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245 1 0 $a Essays in Information Economics.
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300 $a 109 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 83-02, Section: B.
500 $a Advisor: Lizzeri, Alessandro.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2021.
506 $a This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.
520 $a This dissertation consists of two chapters, each of them containing an essay that is related to information economics, either through the design of information policies or in cheap-talk communication settings.The first chapter, "Information Management in the Theory of Delegation," explores how to influence behavior by simultaneously restricting discretion (the delegation problem) and restricting information (the information design problem). My motivation is to understand to what extent a combination of these two tools can properly align a biased individual's incentives, and consequently influence decision-making. To study this problem, I introduce a principal-agent model in which a principal jointly commits to a delegation rule (i.e., specifying a permissible set of actions from which a biased agent can choose), and an information rule (i.e., limiting the information sources the agent has access to). My paper has two main results. First, the principal's and the agent's incentives are fully aligned under the optimal joint delegation and information rules. In particular, subject to the constraints on discretion and information, the agent plays exactly as the principal would want him to. Second, the optimal information rule takes on a monotone partitional structure: the principal introduces noise into the information structure by letting the agent observe only which partition element the true state actually lies in. Given the information he receives, the agent then chooses from the delegation set an action that best serves his interests. I then apply the results to the regulation of a monopolist (agent) who collects consumer-specific data and use it to estimate the underlying demand and determine the profit-maximizing price. Here the monopolist's pricing problem is essentially a problem of third-degree pricing discrimination, where different realizations of demand information play the role of market segments. The welfare-maximizing regulator (principal) can restrict the set of prices available to the monopolist (price regulation), and additionally restrict the use of consumer data for demand estimation and differential pricing (privacy protection). My main results thus directly apply and show that the optimal joint regulatory policies feature a finite set of permissible prices and a finite market segmentation. As a result, given a consumer, the monopolist can identify which market segment the consumer belongs to, and then choose his preferred price from the finite price set. Two findings can be made as follows. First, with the introduction of privacy protection, the optimal price regulation takes the form of a finite set of prices, as opposed to the optimality of price-cap regulation (as an interval) in the full-information benchmark. Second, privacy protection is effective only when it is used along with price regulation, and strikingly, it can also raise the monopolist's profit when the overall elasticity of consumer demand is moderately low. This implies that privacy protection has the potential to induce Pareto improvements in the problem of price regulation.In the second chapter, "Credible Persuasion," I tackle the following question: What private information should a sender possess in order to facilitate his communication with a receiver? I consider a model of persuasion where a sender publicly acquires private information (a signal) before engaging in a cheap-talk game with a receiver. The sender-optimal signal exploits the following trade-off: although better-quality information allows the sender to communicate more precisely, it adversely affects the credibility of the sender's messages. I establish a general no-concealment principle according to which any feasible sender payoff can be attained with a signal that induces full communication in the cheap-talk game. I show under further conditions the sender can use a menu of bi-pooling signals: it partitions the states into intervals such that, in each interval, either all states are pooled into the same signal, or two different signals are sent for states in that interval. Finally, I use the model to discuss how the endogeneity of information asymmetry can affect the trade-off between delegation and communication.
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