Claudia Herresthal

Postdoctoral Researcher
Institute for Microeconomics, University of Bonn

Hidden Testing and Selective Disclosure of Evidence (pdf)

Journal of Economic Theory, Volume 200, 105402, March 2022

A decision maker faces a choice to withdraw or to retain a product but is uncertain about its safety. An agent can gather information through sequential testing. Players agree on the optimal choice under certainty, but the decision maker has a higher safety standard than the agent. We compare the case where testing is hidden and the agent can choose whether to disclose his findings to the case where testing is observable. The agent can exploit the additional discretion under hidden testing to his advantage if and only if the decision maker is sufficiently inclined to retain the product. Hidden testing then yields a Pareto improvement over observable testing if the conflict between players is larger than some threshold, but leaves the decision maker worse off and the agent better off if the conflict is smaller than this threshold.

Performance-Based Rankings and School Quality (pdf)

The Economic Journal, Volume 130, Issue 630, August 2020, Pages 1729–1752

I study students' inferences about school quality from performance-based rankings in a dynamic setting. Schools differ in location and unobserved quality, students differ in location and ability. Short-lived students observe a school ranking as a signal about schools' relative quality, but this signal also depends on the ability of schools' past intakes. Students apply to schools, trading off expected quality against proximity. Oversubscribed schools select applicants based on an admission rule. In steady-state equilibrium, I find that rankings are more informative if oversubscribed schools select more able applicants or if students care less about distance to school.

Work in Progress

Data Linkage between Markets: Does the Emergence of an Informed Insurer Cause Consumer Harm? with Tatiana Mayskaya and Arina Nikandrova

Optimal Transparency in Test Design with Helene Mass