arXiv subjects

Tan Gan

Publications and source records attributed to Tan Gan.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Screening for Choice Sets

We study a screening problem in which an agent privately knows which actions or technologies are feasible and can disclose only a subset to a principal. Once disclosed, feasible options are verifiable and their payoff consequences are publicly known, so private information concerns feasibility rather than payoffs, misreporting restricts the principal's choices directly rather than distorting her beliefs. Assuming feasible sets are ordered by inclusion, we establish a simple characterization of the optimal mechanism, where the principal either behaves as if there is no asymmetric information or locally provides no reward for better proposals. We derive comparative statics and illustrate the framework in applications to managing persuasion, action elicitation, and production-technology elicitation.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Robust Contracting with Career Concerns

We study optimal contracting when workers face career concerns. Labor markets infer ability from performance, but effort affects how informative performance is. This feedback can generate strategic uncertainty: bonuses inducing effort under optimistic beliefs about effort may fail under pessimistic beliefs. We characterize this force through a criterion tied to skill-effort complementarity and solve for the least-cost policy implementing effort in every equilibrium. Under strategic uncertainty, the employer uses dispersed bonuses. High bonuses rule out pessimistic beliefs, raising the reputational stakes and letting lower bonuses motivate effort. Pay dispersion among observationally identical workers grows with career concerns and skill-wage assortativeness.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

Robust Pricing for Quality Disclosure

A platform charges a producer for disclosing quality evidence to consumers before trade. It aims to maximize its revenue guarantee across potentially multiple equilibria which arise from the interdependence of producer purchase decisions and consumer beliefs. The platform's optimal pricing strategy entrenches itself as a market gatekeeper: it induces a unique equilibrium in which non-disclosed products' perceived values are lower than the production cost. To achieve this goal, this pricing strategy iteratively destabilizes under-disclosure equilibria by luring producers to disclose slightly more. Higher-quality producers receive higher rents as their disclosure is prioritized. Despite losing rents, the platform optimally induces socially efficient information transmission for any given evidence structure, and it never benefits from garbling evidence. Compared to the non-robust benchmark, our framework generates more intuitive comparative statics: the platform's ability to extract surplus increases with its value as an information intermediary.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2023

From Doubt to Devotion: Trials and Learning-Based Pricing

An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this dynamic informed principal problem. The belief gap between the informed seller and the uninformed buyer, coupled with the buyer's learning, gives rise to mechanisms that provide the skeptical buyer with limited access to the product and an option to upgrade if the buyer is swayed by a good experience. Depending on the seller's screening technology, this takes the form of free/discounted trials or tiered pricing, which are prevalent in digital markets. In contrast to static environments, having consumer data can reduce sellers' revenue in equilibrium, as they fine-tune the dynamic design with their data forecasting the buyer's learning process.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2023

Managing Persuasion Robustly: The Optimality of Quota Rules

We study a sender-receiver game in which the receiver can commit to a decision rule before the sender determines the information policy. We ask how the receiver should commit, in advance, to a rule that maps the information of the sender into decisions---when the receiver knows neither the sender's true preferences nor the full range of information the sender could supply. To handle this dual uncertainty, we adopt a unified robust framework that nests max-min utility, min-max regret, and min-max competitive ratio as special cases. Across all criteria, the same answer emerges: the optimal rule is always a quota rule.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2022

Gacha Game: When Prospect Theory Meets Optimal Pricing

I study the optimal pricing process for selling a unit good to a buyer with prospect theory preferences. In the presence of probability weighting, the buyer is dynamically inconsistent and can be either sophisticated or naive about her own inconsistency. If the buyer is naive, the uniquely optimal mechanism is to sell a ``loot box'' that delivers the good with some constant probability in each period. In contrast, if the buyer is sophisticated, the uniquely optimal mechanism introduces worst-case insurance: after successive failures in obtaining the good from all previous loot boxes, the buyer can purchase the good at full price.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2020

The Economics of Social Data

A data intermediary acquires signals from individual consumers regarding their preferences. The intermediary resells the information in a product market wherein firms and consumers tailor their choices to the demand data. The social dimension of the individual data -- whereby a consumer's data are predictive of others' behavior -- generates a data externality that can reduce the intermediary's cost of acquiring the information. The intermediary optimally preserves the privacy of consumers' identities if and only if doing so increases social surplus. This policy enables the intermediary to capture the total value of the information as the number of consumers becomes large.

cs.GT↗