Eduardo Perez-Richet

Assistant Professor
Department of Economics, Ecole Polytechnique

Fields:

Microeconomic Theory, Game Theory, Information Economics, Political Economics.

Education:

CV

Published Papers

A Note on the Tight Simplification of Mechanisms, Abstract: Paul Milgrom (2010) proposes to simplify mechanisms by restricting their message space. When doing so, it is important not to create new equilibria. A weakly tight simplification is one that does not create new Nash equilibria, a tight simplification is one that does not create new ε-Nash equilibria. This note offers characterizations of tightness. When the preference domain is that of continuous utility functions on the outcome space, the two notions are equivalent, and are also equivalent to the outcome closure property of Milgrom (2008). Keywords: Economics Letters, 2011, 10 (1), 15-17.
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Working Papers

Complicating to Persuade? Abstract: This paper addresses a common criticism of certification processes: that they simultaneously generate excessive complexity, insufficient scrutiny and high rates of undue validation. We build a model of persuasion in which low and high types pool on their choice of complexity. A natural criterion based on forward induction selects the high-type optimal pooling equilibrium.When the receiver prefers rejection ex ante, the sender simplifies her report. When the receiver prefers validation ex ante, however, more complexity makes the receiver less selective, and we provide sufficient conditions that lead to complexity inflation in equilibrium. Keywords: Complexity Inflation, Certification, Persuasion, Strategic Information Transmission, Signaling Games. (with Delphine Prady), submitted.
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Choosing Choices: Agenda Selection with Uncertain Issues Abstract: We study selection rules: the procedures committees use to choose whether to place an issue on their agenda. At the selection stage of the model, committee members are uncertain about their final preferences. They only know the probability that they will prefer the proposal to the status quo at the decision stage. This probability is private information. Then the probability that the proposal is adopted conditional on a voter being pivotal and eventually preferring the proposal increases at a faster rate with the selection rule than the same probability conditional on her eventually preferring the status quo. To compensate for that, voters become more conservative when the selection rule is more stringent. The decision rule has the opposite effect. We describe optimal rules at the limit when there is a linear cost of organizing the final election. Keywords: Selection Rules, Strategic Voting, Asymmetric Information, Agenda Setting, Citizens' Initiatives (with Raphael Godefroy), revise and resubmit, Econometrica (3rd round).
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Competing with Equivocal Information, Abstract: This paper studies strategic disclosure between multiple senders and a single receiver. The senders are competing for prizes awarded by the receiver. They decide whether to disclose a piece of information that is both verifiable and equivocal (it can influence the receiver both ways). Then the standard unraveling argument breaks down: if the commonly known probability that her information is favorable is sufficiently high, a single sender never discloses. Competition restores full disclosure only if some of the senders are sufficiently unlikely to have favorable information. When the senders are uncertain about each other's strength, however, all symmetric equilibria approach full disclosure as competition increases. Keywords: Strategic Information Transmission, Persuasion Games, Disclosure, Communication, Competition, Advertising, Lobbying. submitted.
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Information and Incentives in a Model of Contest between Large Groups Abstract: In a contest between two large teams, where both initial strengths and participation rates matter, how does the structure of the information of each group about the other one affect the outcome? In particular what is the right balance between private and public information? This paper shows that no modification of this balance can give an unambiguous advantage to any particular team: winning against relatively stronger groups when strong comes at the cost of losing against relatively weaker groups when weak. If the information structure is endogenously chosen ex ante by team leaders who decide the precision of the public information that flows to the other group, high precision obtains when the incentives to participate are high. Keywords:
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