(with Bhaskar Dutta and Sayantan Ghosal), Journal of Economic Theory 122, 143 – 164, 2005.
Summary. This paper studies a model of dynamic network formation when individuals are farsighted: players evaluate the desirability of a “current” move in terms of its consequences on the entire discounted stream of payoffs. We define a concept of equilibrium which takes into account farsighted behavior of agents and allows for limited cooperation amongst agents.
(with Abhijit Banerjee, Dilip Mookherjee and Kaivan Munshi), Journal of Political Economy 109, 138-190, 2001.
Summary. This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. . Predictions concerning the effect of the distribution of local landownership on sugarcane price, capacity levels, and participation rates of different classes of farmers are confirmed by data from nearly 100 sugar cooperatives in the Indian state of Maharashtra over the period 1971–93.
(with Paula Onuchic), October 2019, revised December 2022. Forthcoming, Theoretical Economics.
A sender is about to come into possession of an object of heterogeneous quality. Prior to knowing that quality, she commits to a categorization. That is, she partitions the set of qualities into subsets — some possibly singletons — and verifiably commits to reveal the element in which the quality belongs. The categories must be monotone. Our main results fully describe the profit-maximizing categorization for any pair of priors over object quality held by sender and receiver. We apply these results to the design of educational grades.