arXiv subjects

Georgy Lukyanov

Publications and source records attributed to Georgy Lukyanov.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quality at Stale Prices

We study a continuous-time game in which a firm privately chooses quality and a public-information pricing desk revises its posted price at Poisson opportunities. Customers learn from purchases and silence. For an open set of primitives, we construct an equilibrium in which a previously optimal price sustains quality even though the desk would lower it upon revision. Quality costs exceed every immediate sales return, making the continuation reward necessary. We characterise both the resulting quality episodes and their lifetime incidence. A purchase ends an episode by raising reputation, a revision by changing the price, and silence by lowering reputation. Near the zero-quality threshold, the quality probability has a limiting parabolic profile and most episodes end through silence. If $δ$ is the cost shortfall below that threshold, the expected lifetime number of high-quality decisions and the probability of any such decision are both of order $δ^{3/2}$ from a specified upstream state. The persistent type is eventually learned, strategic quality ceases, and prices settle at type-specific levels. The construction is local at fixed finite discounting.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Persuasion under the Threat of Verification

This paper studies persuasion when public information is costly and receivers can verify the state before acting. Verification may overturn acceptance after favorable public news, but it may also induce acceptance after unfavorable news. We characterize how these two effects shape the sender's optimal experiment. Cheaper verification can lead the sender to disclose less and rely more on receivers' own discoveries, thereby increasing its payoff. With heterogeneous decision thresholds, we identify exact conditions for the disclosure response and show why it depends on the distribution of preferences. In a separate parameter region, cheaper verification increases inspection but reduces every threshold type's final information and welfare; the sender also loses. We then allow receivers to share their findings. Cheaper inspection and wider sharing can move optimal public disclosure in opposite directions, even when both benefit the sender. Wider sharing can also reduce aggregate final information while improving every threshold type's welfare. The results distinguish the effects of verification on public disclosure, information ultimately obtained, and the cost of obtaining it.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Endogenous Vindication: Reputation and Effort in Expert Advice

Does making advice cheaper to implement increase the supply of advice? We study an expert who can release a favorable certificate to a sequence of clients. Implementation requires the certificate, and its outcome depends on client effort. The expert values client surplus and career income from routine employment; ability is unknown to both the expert and the public. A lower fixed implementation cost weakly increases both advice and client surplus. A lower marginal effort cost can have the opposite effect: greater effort makes failure more revealing and can induce the expert to withhold advice permanently. We establish this reversal for every discount factor on an open family with smooth income utility with constant absolute risk aversion. At a common initial reputation, cheaper effort then eliminates public learning and client surplus. The reversal is impossible when the effort rule is held fixed across the same cost change. Rare outside reports preserve the discounted client-surplus reversal, although recurrent informative reports restore eventual learning. Additional shape restrictions yield a reputation cutoff; without them, advice can be disconnected and even success can stop further evaluation.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Costly Comparison and Informational Inertia

A price cut can attract consumers while changing what their purchases reveal to later buyers. We study this trade-off in a duopoly with common uncertainty about quality. Consumers have a default seller and may pay to obtain access to the rival together with a private signal. Firms observe purchases and retain their prices between random opportunities to revise them. In a specified pricing experiment, a cut raises current revenue and remains profitable over two arrivals, but loses over three for sufficiently patient firms. The same cut remains profitable when quality is independently redrawn for each buyer. Using analytical arguments and rigorous numerical bounds, we then construct stationary Markov equilibria on three finite price menus in which an informative purchase leads with positive probability to uninformative purchases and unequal prices. These equilibria require infrequent repricing. Finally, at fixed prices, we introduce a small share of consumers who compare cheaply. Expected exit time from a fixed belief interval is of order the inverse square of this share when defaults are hidden, and of order its inverse when defaults are observed.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

The Price of a Familiar Perspective

Access to past reports changes how consumers learn about competing information providers. A subscriber who has learned to interpret a familiar source may find an equally competent rival less useful. We study how opening the rival's archive changes renewal prices and the effect of outcome feedback. Better feedback strengthens the familiar source's advantage when rival reports are inaccessible, but can weaken it once some rival records are available. We derive the exact threshold in a Gaussian learning model with differentiated price competition. Opening further records narrows the renewal premium and raises consumer surplus. When the familiar source initially serves a sufficiently large share, however, partial opening can reduce aggregate forecasting quality and total surplus by drawing consumers toward a rival that remains less informative. Complete access improves both outcomes relative to every incomplete archive. These results concern a covered interior renewal market with inherited customer histories, before implementation costs. The results distinguish the quality of feedback from access to the records with which consumers combine it.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Learning to Interpret Forecasts: Evidence Quality and Source Familiarity

We study how learning about a forecasting method affects a seller's choice of evidence. More evidence improves the current forecast but makes the method's persistent component harder to identify. A monopolist may therefore collect less evidence initially to help customers interpret later forecasts. Because the seller captures only part of customers' gains from costly evidence, it switches to less initial evidence sooner than a welfare-maximizing regulator. A minimum evidence requirement improves welfare only for intermediate weights on future benefits. An independent assessment removes this learning trade-off but may be privately unprofitable despite being socially worthwhile.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Contrarian Incentives and Costly Social Learning

We study social learning when agents choose costly information and prefer less popular actions. Popularity changes decision cutoffs and can restore the value of information. Under diminishing, nonsummable popularity updates, we characterize complete belief learning by positive attainable net information value at every interior belief, allowing vanishing entry fees and experiments approaching no information. With Gaussian signals and power precision costs, learning is complete exactly when contrarian incentives can align every belief and costs vanish faster than the square root of precision. Under weaker incentives, optimal purchases can have a positive precision floor and a finite expected count even without an entry fee. Rapid popularity updating can also stop learning despite profitable alignment. A positive fixed fee uniformly bounds purchases; a binary illustration characterizes terminal errors and separates belief accuracy from the frequency of correct actions.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Effort without Evidence

Success under a demanding method does not show that its additional demands are worthwhile. I study this distinction in a model of intergenerational learning with hidden effort. Moderate effort is informative about the value of a less demanding method; high effort produces more successes but no information about that question. I first characterize efficient experimentation with a complete record. I then show that parents who underweight descendants' effort costs can induce earlier retirement from experimentation. On an explicit region of priors, a paternalistic equilibrium stops after one failed experiment, whereas an aligned equilibrium allows two. Both transmit the relevant record truthfully and withstand communication deviations: every sender already obtains its preferred full-record continuation. Nevertheless, paternalism lowers discounted material welfare, raises long-run effort and success, and leaves less informative public evidence. Under stronger paternalism, parents may instead conceal knowledge to induce experimentation. I characterize a pooling continuation, establish its local communication stability, and show that it can occur in a full equilibrium. The results distinguish the efficient limits to learning from the additional loss of evidence caused by disagreement over effort costs.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Defensive Pessimism: Growth, Culture, and the Survival of Evidence

A common monetary standard can expand credit while weakening the alternative practices needed to recover from its failure and identify its cause. I study a growing credit economy in which safeguarded real settlements supply recovery capacity, matched observations for a reform decision, and apprenticeships in an alternative practice. The efficient reserve grows in absolute size but becomes a vanishing share of the economy. Protection based on a fixed population share therefore eventually fails, even along a path with expanding capacity and evidence. Voluntary cooperation provides only bounded readiness, while cheaper drills can preserve recovery without producing evidence. Apprenticeship and expected political survival reinforce one another, allowing exposed and protected continuations. I characterize protection indexed to the required service and the least-cost funding of replacement if the original institution is cancelled. The resulting arrangement combines verified procurement, training support when needed, and safe real collateral held by an outside custodian.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Task Architecture and Learning from Coarse Performance

Organizations often learn about competence only from project-level success or failure, even when a project contains several complementary tasks. We compare task architectures by the Blackwell order. An expert of unknown fixed competence can perform all tasks in one bundled project, one task in a project completed by an outside technology, or the same number of tasks across separate projects. Bundling dominates a single narrow assignment below an outside-reliability threshold and is otherwise incomparable with it. Holding the expert's workload fixed strictly lowers this threshold but does not overturn the result: bundling still dominates when the outside technology is sufficiently unreliable, separate projects dominate only when that technology is perfect, and the experiments are otherwise incomparable. We derive the thresholds for any number of tasks and show that the fixed-workload threshold decreases to zero as task scope grows. Explicit posterior-variance formulas measure the cost of coarse aggregation for particular decisions. Finally, in the two-task case, occasional stage-level audits expand the bundling-dominance region according to an exact frontier.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Defense Feedback and Global-Game Selection

Global games select a unique cutoff when a player's incentive moves monotonically with private information. We show that this logic can fail when a privately informed participant can take a costly, simultaneous, and unobserved action that defends the status quo. In a currency-attack model, the defender acts only at intermediate signals. Along the traders' cutoff equation, this interval response creates an endogenous defense-loss term that vanishes at the endpoints of an activation component but can dominate the decreasing benchmark payoff margin in between. We establish a primitive region in which defense is inactive and uniqueness survives, and a finite-CDF overshoot condition under which two active-defense cutoff roots coexist with the inactive benchmark root. Because marginal indifference need not imply global incentives, we also give sufficient conditions for a genuine monotone cutoff best response. Finally, outward-rounded interval arithmetic proves that a proper-prior parameter vector has exactly three symmetric monotone-cutoff equilibria and that this topology persists locally. The result isolates a payoff-based boundary of global-game selection: hidden intervention can restore multiplicity without public signalling or a perturbation of the information hierarchy.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Hidden Eligibility and the Credibility of Adoption

Public support for early adoption can affect what later users learn from observed choices. An adopter may have favourable private information, or may have received a rebate. We study a government that randomly assigns eligibility for a fixed rebate and chooses the program's coverage and reporting rule. We characterize when disclosing individual eligibility changes optimal coverage from zero to a positive rate under general convex program costs. This requires both a favourable marginal return to a disclosed program and a bound on the direct benefit available from a large opaque intervention. In the benchmark, disclosure allows the government to increase early adoption and welfare while leaving expected total adoption unchanged. We then allow imperfect compliance and private information for the late user. An eligibility label can be strictly informative without changing anyone's decision, in which case disclosure has no welfare value. The policy reversal survives when both extensions are present. The results identify when an eligibility record is a useful part of the design of an adoption program.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Reputation, Disclosure, and the Scope of Entry

This paper studies how learning about an incumbent affects the scope of entry when competitive responses use resources shared across markets. An entrant chooses whether to launch in neither, one, or both of two markets. Entry into the second market reduces the incumbent's cost-reducing response in the first and can make one-market entry unattractive. The entrant learns about the incumbent's capability from a record of its response to an earlier rival. More frequent publication encourages a less capable incumbent to imitate a more capable one. An observed response then becomes less informative, and entry after that record expands. We compare publication of conduct with a public audit of capability. For an open set of parameters with uniform setup costs, full publication maximizes total surplus within the specified policy class when publication costs are low. Removing the interaction between response costs across markets reverses this choice, while preserving all early and singleton-market payoffs. A capability audit is dominated in both economies. Expected entry scope is constant across the considered policies within each technology, although productive investment and the allocation of entry change.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Who Enters the Record? Paywalls, Contributor Selection, and Social Learning

This paper studies social learning when buying access to previous decisions also determines whose decision enters the record. Individuals first receive private information and then decide whether to pay for access. A positive price selects relatively weak private beliefs. With one founding observation, every buyer copies it, and the record acquires no further information. With a richer initial history, buyers can disagree and the record can improve; nevertheless, a price bounded away from zero prevents complete learning, even with unbounded private beliefs. We then consider a rule under which a buyer makes a preliminary choice before access and a revised choice afterward. A positive probability of implementing the preliminary choice makes it follow the private signal. Retaining both choices restores complete learning under a fixed effective fee or pooled myopic pricing, including with bounded beliefs. The rule reduces willingness to pay and sacrifices some current decision accuracy. A worked example shows how the subsequent improvement in information can outweigh both initial losses. The results show why preserving a judgment made before exposure can change what later users learn from the same selected population.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

The Fiscal Alibi: Hidden Spending Needs and Government Reputation

A government may ask for a high tax because it faces a genuine expense. The same demand can also be made by a government that intends to keep the proceeds. We study this ambiguity in a two-period reputation model with privately observed spending needs and an endogenous tax base. The opportunist chooses between outright confiscation and levies that an honest government might impose. We characterize the three possible regimes through a single equilibrium equation. A mean-preserving spread of legitimate needs weakly raises the opportunist's lifetime value, with a strict increase precisely when the spread changes the upper tail relevant for mimicry. We then give a necessary and sufficient curvature condition for this ordering to extend to a general reputational continuation prize. Verification reduces the value of concealment, but also changes how the opportunist extracts. In the benchmark economy, greater auditing weakly lowers current citizen welfare, even before audit costs, while improving the future allocation through better information. The welfare case for verification consequently depends on the balance between these two effects. Examples yield no auditing, an optimum within a regime, and an optimum at the boundary between regimes.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Taxing Capital to Protect It

This paper studies the composition of taxation when the government cannot fully commit to respecting private returns after investment. A fiscal authority must finance a given expenditure from labor and capital income. Ordinary tax receipts are protected, but an opportunistic executive can seize part of the remaining capital payment. We show that a revenue-neutral increase in the capital tax raises the probability of compliance whenever the labor tax is below its local, fixed-wage revenue peak, provided the equilibrium remains on a regular mixing branch. This result does not depend on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. The same reform can raise investment: the gain in expected retention must outweigh the decline in the opportunist's continuation gain as compliance becomes less informative. We also characterize the Ramsey allocation conditional on full compliance. Limited commitment then imposes a ceiling on sustainable capital payments, rather than a general lower bound on the statutory capital-tax rate. Finally, we distinguish a change in the authority's concern for the future from an increase in both actors' patience. The former favors more informative policies when continuation welfare is convex; the latter has no unconditional direction in the reduced-form policy problem.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Anonymous Accountability

We ask how an expert panel should disclose auditable conflicts of interest when reports are named and experts care about their reputations for ability. Before sealed binary assessments are filed, an auditor commits to disclosing no orientation information, each named expert's orientation, or only the number of experts oriented in each direction; disclosure occurs after reports are locked. Holding reporting behaviour fixed, composition disclosure and individual attribution are exactly Blackwell-equivalent for learning the state at every finite panel size. Conditional on named reports remaining public, composition is minimal among state-lossless disclosures of orientations: every lossless public message must make the composition recoverable together with the reports. Incentives nevertheless differ sharply. In the large-panel limit near pooling, the local career returns to following evidence against one's orientation under attribution, secrecy, and composition disclosure stand in the ratio 1:4:5. On an open set of parameters, the two extreme regimes have only pooling within symmetric cutoff strategies, while composition disclosure admits a tremble-robust informative equilibrium. Near the lower boundary of this region, a sequence of composition equilibria is sparse---the evidence-following rate is of order 1/N---yet induces a nondegenerate state experiment. Anonymous disclosure can therefore preserve the information available under attribution while creating stronger incentives to produce it.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Self-Employment as a Signal: Career Concerns with Hidden Firm Performance

We study a stationary labour market in which risk-averse workers privately know their permanent talent and choose, period by period, between risky self-employment, whose outcomes become part of a portable public record, and firm employment, which pays a competitive wage but keeps individual performance hidden from the outside market. Because each worker decides whether to generate another public outcome or to apply to a firm, both the population holding a given record and the pool of applicants at that record are endogenous. Market beliefs are therefore constructed in two stages: first from the stationary flow of types through all histories leading to---and retaining---each record, and only then by conditioning on the current application decision. It is shown that, when the effective continuation factor is below one half, a stationary sequential competitive equilibrium exists and occupational choice follows a talent cutoff at every record; the equilibrium need not be unique, and an explicit example with two distinct equilibria is provided. Firm employment persists whenever it is strictly optimal for a given type at a given record. At any on-path record where both occupations are chosen, higher-talent workers select into self-employment, and the applicant wage lies below mean talent among holders of that record; this discount decomposes exactly into the self-employed share and the talent gap between the two groups. The model yields within-record predictions for occupational choice, wages, subsequent performance, and the duration of opaque employment spells.

econ.TH↗