Doctoral defence: “Economics of Information Acquisition and Disclosure”
November 25, 2020
On November 27th, MSocSc (Econ) Andrey Zhukov will defend his doctoral dissertation ”Economics of information acquisition and disclosure”.
The thesis contains an introductory chapter and three essays. The economic phenomenon investigated in the first essay is the public provision of information through voluntary disclosures in asset markets. Mainly, it studies how seller uncertainty regarding whether her private information constitutes conclusive proof of the value of the asset for potential buyers affects the actions of the market participants and, through that, public information provision.
The second essay also concerns the public provision of information through
voluntary disclosures. Specifically, it studies how seller incentives to
acquire and disclose conclusive evidence depend on her informational advantage
over the market.
The third essay revisits a classic model of the optimal search for the best
alternative in Weitzman (1979). Weitzman considers a situation in which a
decision-maker owns a number of boxes, each of which contains an unknown prize.
At each time before she stops, the decision-maker chooses either to learn the
value of the prize in some box or to stop for the payoff equal to the largest
sampled prize. Weitzman assumes that the decision-maker can sample all the
boxes on her own. The social phenomenon examined in the third essay is the
mismatch between property rights and knowledge: the decision-maker owns the
boxes but does not necessarily know how to investigate them and therefore has
to hire intermediaries to do it on her behalf.
Andrey Zhukov works as a data analyst at Rovio, Espoo.