arXiv subjects

Georgy Lukyanov

Publications and source records attributed to Georgy Lukyanov.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reputation without a Control Group

An adviser who warns that a task is difficult may become harder to evaluate when her advice is followed more thoroughly. We study a long-lived adviser and successive short-lived workers who choose between standard and intensive implementation. Standard implementation reveals whether the warning was correct and gives the next worker an opportunity to acquire cost-saving practical knowledge. Intensive implementation protects the project but produces only occasional evidence about the adviser. We construct a stationary sequential equilibrium in which the adviser initially accepts an informative implementation, withholds the next project after her reputation improves, and resumes recommendations once inherited know-how has been lost. The interruption is chosen because it changes the successor's implementation decision: preserving know-how reverses the adviser's preference at the relevant history. All realized evidence remains public. Weak subsequent evidence eventually ends the low-ability adviser's protection, but this can take a long time.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Audit Silence and the Capacity Trap

This paper studies how learning about an inspector's capacity affects compliance in a repeated relationship. A functioning inspector chooses effort, but the implementation of an audit remains uncertain. A constrained inspector audits at a persistently lower rate. The firm may be committed to compliance or may choose to violate; audit occurrence is observed, detection is imperfect, and a finding ends the relationship. When the constrained audit rate lies below every functioning effort level, each missed audit makes constrained capacity more likely. Under explicit payoff and belief conditions, a sufficiently long uninterrupted silence run leads to violation and maximum functioning effort in every sequential equilibrium. Further silence lowers expected auditing despite that effort. The result holds at every fixed discount factor below one, although its sufficient silence bound can become very large with patience. Entry is conditional on the specified history, and clean audits can take beliefs outside the sufficient region. We also compare technologies with the same initial maximum-effort mean audit rate. Raising the capacity floor sustains higher audit ceilings along specified silence paths and, under additional incentive and social-cost conditions, lowers expected loss over a common finite horizon. Finally, constrained inspectors become more prevalent among surviving strategic firms, while the strategic/constrained pair's share of all survivors can fall.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Government Reputation and Fiscal Capacity

How does uncertain implementation shape fiscal policy over time? We study an uninformed fiscal authority that chooses a distortionary tax-financed mandate and audit intensity while a privately informed executive decides whether to deliver or divert the proceeds. Reputation is the Bayesian state variable linking current fiscal control to future capacity. In a two-period benchmark, a mandate is also an experiment: delivery sacrifices current rents but preserves future access. We prove that the dynamic activation threshold is no greater than the square of the static reputation cutoff; the bound is exact and independent of discounting in a linear-benefit, quadratic-cost economy. A positive trial mandate may therefore be optimal when every positive tax is statically undesirable. In the infinite-horizon model, posterior reputation is a bounded martingale and its one-step conditional variance admits an exact policy-dependent formula. Zero mandates can create closed inactive classes in which fiscal activity and learning stop together. On a finite approximation, we compute stationary equilibria with noisy signals, endogenous auditing, and spending-need shocks and certify them against every action in a common adaptive cloud. The equilibria display history-dependent limiting fiscal capacity, non-monotone auditing, and nonlinear responses to spending need: shocks leave mean reputation unchanged but alter its dispersion and exposure to the inactive region.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Reputation, Risk, and Visibility

When does reputation make experts play it safe, and what policy reverses that? I isolate a single lever - visibility of outcomes. In a two-page model with binary signals and outcomes, I show: (i) with an uninformative safe option and symmetric visibility, career concerns alone do not generate conservatism; (ii) increasing failure visibility (as in Registered Reports) weakens high-reputation caution and relaxes selection. I provide a necessary-and-sufficient local sign test, agnostic about utility curvature and allowing informative safe actions, and an identification map suitable for staggered RR adoption.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Learning to Unlearn: Education as a Remedy for Misspecified Beliefs

We study education as a remedy for misspecified beliefs in a canonical sequential social-learning model. Uneducated agents misinterpret action histories - treating actions as if they were independent signals and, potentially, overstating signal precision - while educated agents use the correct likelihoods (and may also enjoy higher private precision). We define a misspecified-belief PBE and show existence with a simple structure: education is a cutoff in the realized cost and actions are threshold rules in a single log-likelihood index. A closed-form value-of-education statistic compares the accuracy of the educated versus uneducated decision at any history; this yields transparent conditions for self-education. When a misspecified process sustains an incorrect cascade, uniformly positive private value and a positive flip probability imply that education breaks the cascade almost surely in finite time, with an explicit bound on expected break time. We quantify welfare gains from making education available and show how small per-education subsidies sharply raise de-cascading probabilities and improve discounted welfare. Extensions cover imperfect observability of education choices and a planner who deploys history-dependent subsidies.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Paying for Failure in Expert Advice

A failed recommendation is visible; an unproposed project is not. How should an organization pay an adviser whose private confidence determines which projects reach the margin? We show that the least-cost instrument is protection after failure rather than a success bonus. Because risky advice selects the upper tail of confidence, success pay leaks to recommendations that would occur anyway, while failure protection is concentrated at the margin. We establish unique nonpooling implementation, show that full correction is never optimal, and, while advice still needs encouragement, find confidential internal review substitutes for explicit career insurance more effectively than transparent review.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Reputational Conservatism in Expert Advice

We study expert advice with career concerns and continuous private signals. The principal always implements the safe option, and implements the risky option with a probability increasing in the expert's reputation; outcomes, when realized, update reputation. We show a unique cutoff equilibrium and continuity. Under a relative-diagnosticity condition, the experimentation threshold is increasing in reputation ("playing it safe at the top"). Comparative statics are clean, and success-contingent bonuses map one-to-one into experimentation while gatekeeping scales implemented experimentation and learning.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Peace Talk and Conflict Traps

Costly pre-play messages can deter unnecessary wars - but the same messages can also entrench stalemates once violence begins. We develop an overlapping-generations model of a security dilemma with persistent group types (normal vs bad), one-sided private signaling by the current old to the current young, and noisy private memory of the last encounter. We characterize a stationary equilibrium in which, for an intermediate band of signal costs, normal old agents mix on sending a costly reassurance only after an alarming private history; the signal is kept marginally persuasive by endogenous receiver cutoffs and strategic mimicking by bad types. Signaling strictly reduces the hazard of conflict onset; conditional on onset, duration is unchanged in the private model but increases once a small probability of publicity (leaks) creates a public record of failed reconciliation. With publicity, play generically absorbs in a peace trap or a conflict trap. We discuss welfare and policy: when to prefer back-channels versus public pledges.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Diagnostic Feedback under Hidden Task Difficulty

An assessment is meant to tell an agent about herself, but its purchase can reveal the task. An evaluator privately observes task difficulty and may publicly purchase an ability diagnostic before effort. With crossing returns across task--ability pairs, adoption and the result jointly shape effort. When high ability is common, difficult tasks are rare, and diagnostic cost is intermediate, an equilibrium refinement uniquely selects diagnosis on the difficult task. Neither type diagnoses when difficulty is public or adoption cannot depend on it. Thus hidden difficulty can produce information about the agent. The mechanism survives continuous effort and imperfect diagnostics.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Optimal Taxation under Imperfect Trust

We study optimal taxation when citizens are not fully confident that the government will transform tax revenue into useful public goods. In an otherwise standard Ramsey framework, a representative agent values a public good financed by distortionary taxes, but believes that the government is honest only with some given probability and may otherwise divert all revenue. This simple departure from the canonical model delivers two central results. First, there is a sharp trust threshold: if perceived government honesty is too low, any positive tax rate lowers expected welfare and the optimal policy is a zero-tax corner, even though the public good is valued. Second, once trust exceeds this threshold, the usual sufficient-statistics logic of optimal taxation re-emerges, but with a trust-adjusted marginal value of public funds that scales down the benefits of raising revenue. In a simple parametric example we obtain closed-form expressions that map trust into the optimal tax rate and the size of the public sector. The framework provides a compact way to incorporate government credibility into tax design and suggests that in low-trust environments credibility-enhancing reforms should precede attempts to expand the tax base.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Capacity, Patronage, and Exit from Mutual Credit

Member-owned lenders pool project returns and rebate surplus as patronage, insuring borrowers but tying membership value to pool composition. We study a capacity-constrained mutual alongside competitive market debt. Market access initially complements the mutual by financing rationed borrowers. Once capacity is broad enough, however, high-return members prefer individual debt to subsidizing the common pool and exit. Their departure frees capacity for low-return members but destroys risk sharing. Market access therefore raises welfare at low capacity and lowers it near full capacity: cream-skimming begins strictly before it becomes harmful. The mechanism survives incomplete pooling.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Honesty, Stigma, and Cooperation in an Overlapping-Generations Game

We study a two-period overlapping-generations game in which a young agent interacts with an old agent and carries a binary record into old age. Honest agents cooperate with clear partners, whereas strategic agents have a privately known loss from being exploited. A clear record is informative: honest agents remain clear, while some strategic agents acquire stigma. We incorporate this selection into Bayes-consistent stationary equilibrium beliefs. With uniformly distributed losses, strategic young agents use a cutoff rule and equilibrium reduces to a quadratic equation. A simple parameter region has a unique equilibrium; when the temptation to defect is high, low- and high-cooperation corner equilibria coexist with an interior tipping equilibrium. Along that interior branch, a larger honest share lowers both the strategic cutoff and the young cooperation rate. The branch is locally unstable, however, so the result describes a moving coordination threshold rather than a deterioration of stable equilibrium selection. Under a maximin decision rule, strategic cooperation disappears. Probabilistic record clearing weakens incentives at every fixed conjecture, reduces cooperation at locally stable interior equilibria, and under full clearing leaves only defection by strategic agents.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Designing Silence: Peer Feedback under Reputational Concerns

How should an organization control what its experts learn from one another between a first opinion and a final one? We study a platform that collects two independent binary forecasts and decides whether the second expert may see the first expert's lodged report before revising, when experts are rewarded for reputation rather than accuracy. The platform commits to a reveal-or-silence lottery conditioned on whether the lodged reports agree. Because non-revelation is informative, silence becomes an instrument of design rather than the absence of one. Our main result is a concealment-ray theorem: along policy rays that hold fixed the composition of the silent pool, the value of every finite downstream decision problem and every locked-report incentive slack is affine. A two-dimensional design problem therefore collapses to full disclosure and two one-dimensional boundaries. At an exact rational profile, a computer-assisted certificate identifies the unique state-classification optimum within the maintained class: disagreement is never revealed, while approximately 71.08 percent of agreements are revealed---just enough to make silence unfavourable news and eliminate a low-ability expert's tendency to stand by a stale forecast. The policy strictly outperforms both sealing and full disclosure, although the gain over full disclosure is modest, and remains uniquely optimal after recalibrating the threshold on an open set of nearby primitives. Two qualifications delimit its reach. Sealing and full disclosure are Blackwell incomparable, so no protocol is best for every downstream objective. Moreover, every policy admits an uninformative equilibrium, so the comparison is conducted within a maintained regular-monotone class.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Two Motives for Verification in Information Cascades

We study sequential social learning when agents can pay to conduct a publicly observed investigation before acting. The baseline test is one-sided: success conclusively establishes one state, whereas failure is ordinarily inconclusive; success also gives the investigator a discovery reward. Investigation therefore has two private returns. Its diagnostic value is highest near the action threshold and vanishes at sufficiently optimistic beliefs, while the expected discovery reward is weakly increasing. The equilibrium investigation set has at most two components and can be disconnected, with a central diagnostic region and a separate high-belief, reward-driven region. Because investigation is selected on private information, the attempt itself is informative. The exact public transition map shows that a failed investigation can raise public belief when favorable selection outweighs the adverse outcome. Nevertheless, a positive chance of proof at a given history does not guarantee eventual discovery: with strictly positive cost, the total number of attempts is finite almost surely under either state, and a failure can move beliefs into an absorbing cascade trap. The two-component geometry persists for sufficiently small false-positive rates and can also arise with heterogeneous private costs. The stopping result, however, relies on conclusive evidence and a positive lower bound on costs.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Public Communication in Regime Change games

We study a regime change game in which the state and an opposition leader both observe the regime's true strength and may engage in costly communication by manipulating the mean of citizens' private signals. Each citizen then decides whether to attack the regime; the citizens take their private signals at face value and do not discount or attempt to undo propaganda or counter-propaganda. From the perspective of both the state and the opposition, the size of the attack is uncertain, as the number of committed partisans - those who always attack regardless of their signal - is not observed in advance. We show that a regime on the brink of collapse optimally refrains from propaganda, while the opposition engages in counter-propaganda. The equilibrium level of counter-propaganda increases with the opposition's benefit-cost ratio and with the precision of citizens' private signals, and decreases with the cost of attacking.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Public Communication with Externalities

This paper develops a model in which a sender strategically communicates with a group of receivers whose payoffs depend on the sender's information. It is shown that aggregate payoff externalities create an endogenous conflict of interests between the sender and the receivers, rendering full information revelation, in general infeasible. We demonstrate that an exogenous bias in the sender's preferences can improve public information provision and raise welfare. Two applications of the setup are discussed.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Belief Diversity and Cooperation

This paper studies a two-player game in which the players face uncertainty regarding the nature of their partner. In this variation of the standard Prisoner's Dilemma, players may encounter an 'honest' type who always cooperates. Mistreating such a player imposes a moral cost on the defector. This situation creates a trade-off, resolved in favor of cooperation if the player's trust level, or belief in their partner's honesty, is sufficiently high. We investigate whether an environment where players have explicit beliefs about each other's honesty is more or less conducive to cooperation, compared to a scenario where players are entirely uncertain about their partner's beliefs. We establish that belief diversity hampers cooperation in environments where the level of trust is relatively low and boosts cooperation in environments with a high level of trust.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Collateral and Reputation in a Model of Strategic Defaults

This paper builds a finite-horizon model to study the role of physical collateral in a model of strategic defaults, when the borrower can develop reputation for honesty. Asset ownership increases attractiveness of the reputational channel: the borrower who would prefer to remain in autarky in the absence of the asset prefers to apply for collateralized debt. Pledging the asset as collateral facilitates reputation building, which is especially successful at the times of asset price drops, because these are the times when default is most tempting. The complementarity between secured and unsecured lending is especially pronounced when the ratio of the borrower's financial to non-financial income is neither too large nor too small.

econ.TH↗