This dissertation studies information economics in strategic and decision settings.
In Chapter 1, I introduce flexible endogenous monitoring into dynamic moral hazard. A principal can commit to not only an employment plan but also the monitoring technology to incentivize dynamic effort from an agent. Optimal monitoring follows a Poisson process that produces rare informative signals, and the optimal employment plan features decreasing turnover. To incentivize persistent effort, the Poisson monitoring takes the form of "bad news'' that leads to immediate termination. Monitoring is non-stationary: the bad news becomes more precise and less frequent.
In Chapter 2, which is joint work with Qingmin Liu, we analyze a model of strategic exploration in which competing players independently explore a set of alternatives. The model features a multiple-player multiple-armed bandit problem and captures a strategic trade-off between preemption---covert exploration of alternatives that the opponent will explore in the future---and prioritization---exploration of the most promising alternatives. Our results explain how the strategic trade-off shapes equilibrium behaviors and outcomes, e.g., in technology races between superpowers and R&D competitions between firms. We show that players compete on the same set of alternatives, leading to duplicated exploration from start to finish, and they explore alternatives that are a priori less promising before more promising ones are exhausted.
In Chapter 3, I study how a forward-looking decision maker experiments on unknown alternatives of spatially correlated utilities, modeled by a Brownian motion so that similar alternatives yield similar utilities. For example, a firm experiments on its size that yields unknown, spatially correlated profitability. Experimentation trades off the opportunity cost of exploitation for the indirect inference from the explored alternatives to unknown ones. The optimal strategy is to explore unknown alternatives and then exploit the best known alternative when the explored becomes sufficiently worse than the best. The decision maker explores more quickly as the explored alternative worsens. My model predicts the conditional Gibrat's law and linear relation between firm size and profitability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/1gjw-zx76 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Wong, Yu Fu |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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