Andres Espitia

Hi!

I am a theorist studying how firms and other organizations respond to environments where behavioral biases, non-standard preferences, or informational frictions are prevalent.

I am currently a postdoc at the Institute for Microeconomics at the University of Bonn.

I am on the 2024-2025 Job Market.

Curriculum Vitae

My email is aespitia@uni-bonn.de.

Research

Working papers

When to request evidence? (with E. Muñoz-Rodríguez) - Available on 23/11/2024!

Appropriate decisions depend on information gathered before hand. We study the problem faced by a decision-maker who can only access to verifiable information through an agent who prefers a particular decision. In a dynamic framework with exogenous decision timing, we analyze when to optimally request evidence and how it affects allocational efficiency. The optimal mechanism without transfers implements the efficient allocations if and only if the costs of information acquisition are low for both parties. Otherwise, the decision-maker commits to distortions (from the static optimal choice) to incentivize information acquisition. Optimal evidence acquisition exhibits a bias: it tends to request additional evidence when the current one favors the agent's preferred choice. Applications include optimal testing policies for patients awaiting transplants and the optimal promotion of employees subject to moral hazard.

Confidence and Organizations [Video]

Miscalibrated beliefs generally compromise the quality of workers' decisions. Why might a firm prefer to hire an individual known to be overconfident? In this paper, I explore the role of such biases when members of the organization disagree about the right course of action. I present a model in which an agent uses his private information to make a choice on behalf of a principal. In this setting, I consider what I call the belief design problem: how would the principal like the agent to interpret his observations? I provide conditions under which the solution indicates a preference for a well-calibrated, an underconfident, or an overconfident agent. A well-calibrated agent is preferred if and only if his information does not affect the expected difference in the players' preferred actions. Overconfidence is optimal when the principal seeks to adjust actions beyond what a well-calibrated agent would do.

Work in progress

Robust contracts under social preferences

A principal faces several moral hazard problems under multitasking, one with each of several agents. While these problems are independent, the principal is concerned that agents may also intrinsically care about their peers' payoffs. For example, agents may have status concerns and evaluate wages according to their ranking in the group. Alternatively, agents may be averse to ex-post inequality. The exact shape of the agents' preferences, however, is not fully known by the principal; she only knows that they belong to some specific class. This project explores the type of contracts that perform robustly well from the principal's perspective. Contracts that combine individual and group incentives can perform well by leveraging agents' choices across tasks to gather information about their true preferences.

Research careers

The highly skewed distribution of scientific output is a striking regularity present across different fields. Moreover, inequality in the distribution of publications increases over the career of a given cohort of scientists. In this paper, I ask whether the publication process by itself can generate this type of dynamics. I show that the instrumental use of researchers' reputations (which depend on their past publications) in the refereeing process can be enough to concentrate publications.