Placement Director: Vijay Krishna
    (814) 863-8543
    vkrishna@psu.edu

Contact Information:
Maxim Ivanov
  Office: (319) 335-0848
  Cell: ( 319) 400-1412
E-mail: mgi103@psu.edu
Website: http://www.http://www.econ.psu.edu/~mgi103/

CURRENT POSITION:

• Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Iowa

EDUCATION:

• Ph.D., Economics, The Pennsylvania State University, expected 2008
• M.A., Economics, New Economic School , Russia , 2002
• M.S. (cum laude), Electrical Engineering, Tomsk University of Control Systems and Radio Electronics (TUCSR), Russia , 2000

PH.D. THESIS:

• "Essays on Theory of Information”
Thesis Advisors: Professors Kalyan Chatterjee and Vijay Krishna

FIELDS:

• Primary: Microeconomics, Game Theory
• Secondary : Industrial Organization

PAPERS:

• “Informational Control and Organizational Design,” 2007
• “Dynamic Information Revelation in Cheap Talk,” 2006
• “Information Disclosure in Competitive Markets,” 2007
• "Communication through a Biased Mediator,” (in progress)

GRANTS &
FELLOWSHIPS:

• Liberal Arts College Dissertation Support Grant, Penn State University , 2006
• Full Scholarship, New Economic School, 2000-2002
• Full Scholarship, TUCSR, 1994-2000 Research Support Award, TUCSR, 1998-1999

TEACHING EXPERIENCE:

• Instructor: Intermediate Macroeconomics (3 semesters), Money and Banking
• Teaching Assistant: Principles of Micro- and Macroeconomics, International Finance and Open Economy Macroeconomics, Economics of Transition, Intermediate Macroeconomics
• Teaching Assistant at New Economic School: Economics of Transition

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE:

• Research Assistant for Vijay Krishna, Summer 2005, 2006

PRESENTATIONS & OTHER PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES:

• University of Western Ontario , 2007
• University of Iowa , 2007
• North American Meetings of the Econometric Society, Minneapolis , 2006
• 17th International Conference on Game Theory, Stony Brook, 2006
• Cornell-Penn State Workshop, 2006
• Royal Economic Society Conference, Nottingham , 2006

REFERENCES:

• Professor Kalyan Chatterjee
• Professor Edward Green
• Professor Vijay Krishna

THESIS ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on organizational issues of allocating authority between an uninformed principal and an informed expert. We show that the standard result that delegation of authority to a perfectly informed expert is better than communication is reversed if the principal can restrict the precision of the expert's information (without learning its content).

In general, any conflict of interest between the two parties significantly reduces the benefits of communication, since the expert may want to distort information in an attempt to manipulate the principal's decision. A potentially effective solution to this problem is to delegate authority to the expert herself and gain from her informational advantage. As demonstrated by Dessein (2002), even though the expert would prefer a biased decision relative to the optimal decision for the principal, the trade-off between the loss of authority in delegation and the loss of information in communication often favors the former. However, despite the informational benefits of delegation, many companies today still centralize authority at the upper level of the hierarchy.

This paper analyzes the benefits of another instrument-control over the quality of the expert's information. As shown by Fischer and Stocken (2001) for some special cases, restricting the amount of information available to an expert can provide better performance than communication with a fully informed expert. It is natural to ask whether restricting the availability of information does better than full or partial delegation and how the two modes of modifying the communication game interact with each other. This paper addresses these questions. We demonstrate that informational control in communication is generally beneficial for the principal compared to both communication with a perfectly informed expert and optimal delegation. Moreover, restricting the expert's information is strictly beneficial even when combining these instruments, that is, when the principal restricts the expert's information and delegates decision making afterwards. Thus, informational control is a universal instrument that can effectively complement other incentive mechanisms.

Essay 2: “Dynamic Information Revelation in Cheap Talk”

In this paper, we investigate a multi-stage version of Crawford-Sobel's (1982) communication game in which the principal can affect the quality of the expert's private information at every stage (without knowing its content). We show how the principal can use these instruments-controlling the expert's information and dynamic interaction-to effectively extract all of the expert's information. In particular, dynamic updating of the expert's information allows the principal to refine the information step-by-step, preserving truth-telling communication at every stage of communication. As a result, he is able to achieve (almost) full information revelation over a large interval of states. This implies that the performance of the multi-stage communication relative to the one-stage rises without a bound as the bias in preferences falls.

Essay 3: “Information Disclosure in Competitive Markets”

This paper investigates a market with several sellers of ex-ante identical goods. Each good has a special feature that affects private valuation by a potential buyer. We investigate the sellers' incentives to reveal this product relevant information by introducing differentiation among goods. The main result is that when the number of sellers reaches some critical level, it results in the unique symmetric equilibrium with full disclosure of information. Thus, competitive market refines the result by Lewis and Sappington (1994) for monopoly, which states that the monopolist reveals either full information or no information. In addition, we provide conditions that allow us to test whether the competitive pressure is sufficiently high to provide full information disclosure.