Ph.D. Candidate in Economics

Supervisor: Roman Inderst

Contact:

Chair of Finance and Economics

Goethe University

Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 3

60323 Frankfurt, Germany

sergey.turlo[at]hof.uni-frankfurt.de

+49 (0)69 798 34033

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Working Papers

Persuasion through Ordered Information (Job market paper)

I consider a model of costly information acquisition where the order in which a receiver can learn about the various characteristics of a multi-attribute offering is determined by a sender who wants to persuade the receiver to accept the offering. I characterize optimal attribute orders when the receiver either learns simultaneously or sequentially, and attributes are heterogeneous either with respect to learning costs or dispersions. Further, I obtain clear-cut conditions on when there is an over- and under-provision of information and show that the number of attributes learned in equilibrium is non-monotonic in the receiver's outside option. Moreover, this paper highlights the role of the distribution of costs and dispersions across attributes as a key determinant for the sender's ability to persuade. Lastly, I discuss various applications for this form of persuasion such as the choice of obfuscation and the regulation of information provision.

Regulating Cancellation Rights with Consumer Experimentation (joint with Florian Hoffmann and Roman Inderst)

Embedding consumer experimentation with a product or service into a market environment, we find that unregulated contracts induce too few returns or cancellations, as they do not internalize a pecuniary externality on other firms in the market. Forcing firms to let consumers learn longer by imposing a commonly observed statutory minimum cancellation or refund period is socially efficient only when firms appropriate much of the market surplus, while it backfires otherwise. Interestingly, cancellation rights are a poor predictor of competition, as in the unregulated outcome firms grant particularly generous rights when competition is neither too low nor too high.

Mergers, Welfare, and Bargaining Power

I study the impact of upstream mergers on prices in a model of vertically related markets where input prices are determined by negotiations. I show how the impact of bargaining power on price changes caused by a merger can be non-monotonic. This analysis has two implications. First, when conducting a merger simulation in a vertically related industry it is important to estimate bargaining weights. Second, the efficiency gains that are necessary for a merger to be welfare increasing are rather small when either sellers have little bargaining power or when buyers have little bargaining power and there are large differences in upstream efficiency. The identified non-monotonicity is more general and can be applied to any bargaining context where a buyer's disagreement payoff varies.