D. Carlos Akkar

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Welcome!

I am a microeconomic theorist with a focus on information economics. I am currently a DPhil (PhD) student at the University of Oxford.

I am on the 2024 - 2025 Job Market. Here is my CV.

Reach me: akkarcarlos (AT) gmail.com


Job Market Paper

The (Mis)use of Information in Decentralised Markets

Abstract
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the information available about buyers' common value, but also the adverse selection each buyer faces. With more buyers, trade surplus eventually increases and converges to the full-information upper bound if and only if the likelihood ratio of buyers' signals are unbounded from above. Otherwise, it eventually decreases and converges to the no-information lower bound. With better information about trades buyers would have accepted, trade surplus increases. With better information about trades they would have rejected, trade surplus decreases---unless adverse selection is irrelevant. For binary signals, a sharper characterisation emerges: stronger good news increase total surplus, but stronger bad news eventually decrease it.


Working Papers

Capture-Resistant Committee Design (coming soon!)

Abstract
A lobbyist wants to sway a committee towards implementing a policy by publicly designing and revealing the outcome of an experiment. Each committee member prefers to adopt the policy if the probability of its success exceeds her personal threshold. After the lobbyist reveals the outcome and before they vote, each committee member acquires additional, flexible but costly, private information about the chance of success. A dictatorial voting rule is optimal; it maximises the probability of adoption for a policy that will succeed, minimises it for a policy that will fail, and minimises every member’s information acquisition cost. The optimal dictator is the most demanding member---the member who would acquire the most evidence in favour of the policy before she implements it.


Collusive College Admissions (reach out for draft)

Abstract
I study a matching market à la Azevedo and Leshno (2016), with two colleges and a continuum of students. Colleges differ in their "prestige" and choose how much to invest in their quality. Students have identical preferences over prestige and quality pairs, but face uncertainty over colleges' capacities. They are vertically differentiated in their "promise". I show that the Boston mechanism might leave both colleges better off relative to a mechanism that produces the unique ex post stable outcome. The college with lower prestige benefits from an allocative effect: it attracts some promising students away from its rival by offering a safer bet. The college with greater prestige benefits from a competitive effect: by conceding those students to its rival, it attenuates competition for the most promising ones.


Supervisors and Letter Writers



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