Job Market Paper
“The Gatekeeping Expert’s Dilemma” [SSRN] [supplementary material]
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This paper studies how experts with veto power—gatekeeping experts—influence agents through communication. Their expertise informs agents’ decisions, while veto power provides discipline. Gatekeepers face a dilemma: transparent communication can invite gaming, while opacity wastes expertise. How can gatekeeping experts guide behavior without being gamed? Many economic settings feature this tradeoff, including bank stress tests, environmental regulations, and financial auditing. Using financial auditing as the primary setting, I show that strategic vagueness resolves this dilemma: by revealing just enough to prevent the manager from inflating the report, the auditor guides the manager while minimizing opportunities for manipulation. This theoretical lens provides a novel rationale for why auditors predominantly accept clients’ financial reports. Comparative statics reveal that greater gatekeeper independence or expertise sometimes dampens communication. This paper offers insights into why gatekeepers who lack direct control can still be effective.
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Working Papers
“Mandatory vs. Voluntary Disclosure in the Dynamic Market for Lemons,” 2024 (with Cyrus Aghamolla) [SSRN]
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R&R at Review of Financial Studies
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We consider a dynamic adverse selection setting where a privately informed seller can choose to reveal or withhold past trade information to privately informed buyers. Buyers naturally receive less information when the seller can strategically withhold negative news relative to a setting where current buyers always observe the seller’s history of trade, i.e., mandatory disclosure. Despite the informational disadvantage, we find that strategic disclosure by the seller can be a Pareto improvement and welfare-increasing relative to mandatory disclosure, under which past trade is always disclosed. This occurs because voluntary disclosure can attenuate the seller’s incentive to engage in destructive signaling and can lead to more efficient trade.
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“Disclosure, Signaling, and First-Mover (Dis)advantage,” 2024 [SSRN]
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This paper studies voluntary disclosure in a leader-follower game in a product market. The leader is privately informed about the demand prospect of the market. The leader chooses a production level and decides whether to disclose it. On the one hand, such disclosure is beneficial, as the leader can enjoy the first-mover advantage. On the other hand, the follower learns the leader’s private information through disclosed information, so the leader firm has an incentive to contract production to signal low demand. This is costly to the leader, as the leader may end up producing and earning less than the follower (first-mover disadvantage). To avoid such signaling costs, the leader can conceal the production information. In equilibrium, when the leader is long-term oriented, the leader discloses the production plan only when the private demand signal is low. More competition leads to less disclosure. When the leader firm has the short-term incentive of maximizing the stock price, an interval disclosure equilibrium could emerge. I extend the baseline model to the case where the leader may not observe a private signal. I show that this friction allows the leader firm to save the signaling cost by mimicking the uninformed type. This paper offers a theory of endogenous disclosure cost.
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“Conformity and Leadership in Organizations,” 2025 [SSRN]
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Some organizations are characterized by a conformity culture, where followers are expected to conform to the leadership’s behavior. In contrast, other organizations exhibit an anticonformity culture. What drives the variation in conformity culture across organizations? This paper develops a model of leadership and (anti)conformity culture in organizations with dispersed information. The optimal culture trades off coordination gains against informational losses. I show that with strategic complementarity, conformity is optimal; whereas with strategic substitutability, anticonformity is optimal. By showing how culture coordinates agents in organizations with dispersed knowledge—much like the price system coordinates agents in decentralized markets (Hayek, 1945)—I contribute to the theory of organizations centered on corporate culture (Kreps, 1990). Comparative statics of optimal culture sheds light on the origins of cultural variation across organizations from an informational perspective.
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“Strategic Patenting Under Financial Disclosure Mandates,” 2025 (with Li Azinovic-Yang, Yue Chen, and Sunho Yoo) [SSRN]
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We examine how financial disclosure regulations influence firms’ intellectual property (IP) protection strategies. While disclosure enhances transparency, it also exposes firms to competitive risks by revealing insights into their product market performance. Firms’ strategic responses involve a trade-off between using patents to obtain legal protection and incurring the informational costs of patent disclosure. We develop a model of firms’ patenting decisions that jointly embeds financial and patent disclosure. Our model predicts that increased financial transparency raises the risk of not patenting, compelling firms to lower their patenting threshold. This effect, which leads to more patent filings of lower average quality, dominates as long as financial and patent disclosures are substitutes or not strongly complementary. We test these predictions using the ASC 606 revenue disaggregation requirement. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that affected firms file significantly more patents after the announcement, and the average quality of new patents declines. We also find that the effects are stronger for firms that historically rely more on patenting for protection and for firms with more opaque ex-ante information environments.
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