PhD Candidate, Department of Economics

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Contact Information

Department of Economics
Northwestern University
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

Phone: 413-687-5731

quitze.vs@u.northwestern.edu

 

 

 

Education

Ph.D., Economics, Northwestern University, 2021 (expected)
MA, Economics, Northwestern University, 2017
BA, Economics-Mathematics, Columbia University, 2015

Primary Fields of Specialization

Microeconomic Theory

Secondary Fields of Specialization

Public Economics, Industrial Organization

Curriculum Vitae

Download Vita (PDF)

Job Market Paper

“Market-Based Mechanisms” (with Francisco Poggi)
Market-Based Mechanisms (PDF)

This paper studies the general problem of a principal who conditions their actions on aggregate market outcomes in order to target an unobserved payoff-relevant state. Agents in the market have private information about the state, and their choices reflect both their beliefs about the state and their expectations of the principal’s actions. We fully characterize the set of joint distributions of market outcomes, principal actions, and states that can be implemented in equilibrium. We focus in particular on implementation under constraints imposed by concerns about manipulation and equilibrium multiplicity. This characterization of the feasible set admits a tractable representation, and significantly simplifies the principal’s design problem. A simple graphical technique allows us to identify qualitative features of optimal policies. We apply our results to study corporate bailouts and monetary policy.

Other Research Papers

“Screening and Information-Sharing Externalities”
Screening-and-Information-Sharing-Externalities-6-7-21

In many settings, multiple uninformed agents bargain simultaneously with a single informed agent in each of multiple periods. For example, workers and firms negotiate each year over salaries, and the firm has private information about the value of workers’ output. I study the effects of transparency in these settings; uninformed agents may observe others’ past bargaining outcomes, e.g. wages. I show that in equilibrium, each uninformed agent will choose in each period whether to try to separate the informed agent’s types (screen) or receive the same outcome regardless of type (pool). In other words, the agents engage in a form of experimentation via their bargaining strategies. There are two main theoretical insights. First, there is a complementary screening effect: the more agents screen in equilibrium, the lower the information rents that each will have to pay. Second, the payoff of the informed agent will have a certain supermodularity property, which implies that equilibria with screening are “fragile” to deviations by uninformed agents. I apply the results to study pay-secrecy regulations and anti-discrimination policy. I show that, surprisingly, penalties for pay discrimination may have no impact on bargaining outcomes. I discuss how this result depends on the legal framework for discrimination cases, and suggest changes to enhance the efficacy of anti-discrimination regulations. In particular, anti-discrimination law should preclude the so-called “salary negotiation defense”.

“Redistribution Through Tax Relief”
Redistribution Through Tax Relief (PDF)

This paper theoretically and empirically explores simple policy solutions to the entwined issues of high property taxes, geographic income disparities, and inequality in public education prevalent in the United States. By accounting for heterogeneity in incomes and home qualities, I am able to shed new light on classic questions regarding competition in local public goods provision, and make novel policy recommendations. I characterize the equilibrium in a dynamic general equilibrium model of location choice and education investment with a competitive housing market, heterogeneous wealth levels and home qualities, and strategic district governments. When all homes are owner-occupied, I show that competition between strategic districts leads to over-taxation in an attempt to attract wealthier residents. A simple class of policies that cap and/or tax the expenditure of richer districts are Pareto improving, and thus politically feasible. These policies reduce inequality in access to education while increasing expenditure on the most under-funded schools. I discuss the policy implications of the degree of homeownership. Finally, I test the assumptions and implications empirically using a regression discontinuity design and data on property tax referenda in Massachusetts.

“Platform-Mediated Competition”
Platform-Mediated Competition (PDF)

Cross-group externalities and network effects in two-sided platform markets shape market structure and competition policy, and are the subject of extensive study. Less understood are the within-group externalities that arise when the platform designs many-to-many matchings: the value to agent i of matching with agent j may depend on the set of agents with which j is matched. These effects are present in a wide range of settings in which firms compete for individuals custom or attention. I characterize platform-optimal matchings in a general model of many-to-many matching with within-group externalities. I prove a set of comparative statics results for optimal matchings, and show how these can be used to analyze the welfare effects various changes, including vertical integration by the platform, horizontal mergers between firms on one side of the market, and changes in the platform’s information structure. I then explore market structure and regulation in two in-depth applications. The first is monopolistic competition between firms on a retail platform such as Amazon. The second is a multi-channel video program distributor (MVPD) negotiating transfer fees with television channels and bundling these to sell to individuals.

“Subjective Complexity Under Uncertainty”
Subjective Complexity Under Uncertainty (PDF)

Complexity of the problem of choosing among uncertain acts is a salient feature of many of the environments in which departures from expected utility theory are observed. I propose and axiomatize a model of choice under uncertainty in which the size of the partition with respect to which an act is measurable arises endogenously as a measure of subjective complexity. I derive a representation of incomplete Simple Bounds preferences in which acts that are complex from the perspective of the decision maker are bracketed by simple acts to which they are related by statewise dominance. The key axioms are motivated by a model of learning from limited data. I then consider choice behavior characterized by a “cautious completion” of Simple Bounds preferences, and discuss the relationship between this model and models of ambiguity aversion. I develop general comparative statics results, and explore applications to portfolio choice, contracting, and insurance choice.

“Efficiency in Bargaining with Externalities” (note)
Efficiency in Bargaining with Externalities (PDF)

Consider a principal contracting with multiple agents. The principal engages in simultaneous bilateral negotiations with each agent over an allocation (referred to as the “trade”) and payment. There are externalities to trade; each agent’s payoffs depends on their own trade and that of the other agents. I show that under general assumptions on the bargaining protocol, the payoff of the principal is increasing in the aggregate surplus generated by trade. In particular, this implies that the principal-optimal trade profile is efficient.

“Reverse Bayesianism: A Generalization” with Edi Karni and Marie-Louise Vierø,
Forthcoming in B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics
Reverse Bayesianism: A Generalization (PDF working paper version)

This paper studies an environment in which a decision maker choosing between acts may initially be unaware of certain consequences. We follow the approach of Karni and Vierø (2013) to modeling increasing awareness, which allows for the decision maker’s state space to expand as she becomes aware of new possible consequences. We generalize the main result in Karni and Vierø (2013) by allowing the discovery of new consequences to nullify some states that were non-null before the discovery. We also provide alternative assumptions which strengthen the predictions of the belief updating model.

 

References

Prof. Marciano Siniscalchi (Committee Chair)
Prof. Alessandro Pavan
Prof. Eddie Dekel