Fabio MICHELUCCI

Qualifica
Professore Ordinario
Telefono
041 234 9190
E-mail
fabio.michelucci@unive.it
SSD
ECONOMIA POLITICA [SECS-P/01]
Sito web
www.unive.it/persone/fabio.michelucci (scheda personale)
Struttura
Dipartimento di Economia
Sito web struttura: https://www.unive.it/dip.economia
Sede: San Giobbe
Research Institute
Research Institute for Complexity

FABIO MICHELUCCI

Department of Economics, Università Ca’ Foscari
San Giobbe, Cannaregio 873
30121 Venice, Italy
fabio.michelucci@unive.it
Web: www.fabiomichelucci.com

 

PRESENT APPOINTMENTS

- Professor of Economics, Ca' Foscari, since 23/12/ 2021

- Fellow of the Agora centre for institutional, market and organizational design 

- Associate Editor for Research in Economics, since November 2021

- Member of the Research Institute for Complexity

 

PAST APPOINTMENTS

- Associate Professor of Economics, Ca' Foscari, 15 October 2019 to 22/12/ 2021

- Associate Professor with Tenure (US permanent charter), CERGE-EI, January 2016-14 October 2019

- Assistant Professor, CERGE-EI (under US permanent charter), Sept. 2009-Dec. 2015

- Postodoctoral Scholar, Caltech, Jan. 2007-March 2009 (supported by Prof. Goeree’s Dutch NSF Grant VICI 453.03.606)

- Assegnista di Ricerca (Researcher) at Bocconi University, 06/2006-12/2006

 

VISTING POSITIONS

- University of Turin, November 2019.

- European University Institute, April-July 2017. 

- University of Queensland, August - October 2016 (invited by Prof. Flavio Menezes).

- Toulouse School of Economics, October 2015 (invited by  Prof. Patrick Rey).

- Université Paris-Dauphine, September 2014. 

- Université Paris-Dauphine, March 2013. 

- Nuffield College, Oxford, February 2014 (invited by Prof. Paul Klemperer).

 

EDUCATION

- University College London, Ph.D. in Economics 2007
- Universitat Pompeu Fabra, M.Sc. in Economics 2001
- Università di Firenze, B.A. in Economics, Summa cum Laude and Honors (110/110 e lode e auspicio di pubblicazione), 2000


RESEARCH INTERESTS

Microeconomic Theory, Industrial Organization, Market Design, Auction Theory, Bounded Rationality, Experimental Economics, Political Economy

 

TEACHING ACTIVITIES AND THESIS SUPERVISION

 

At Ca’ Foscari I have taught bachelor, master and Ph.D. level courses in Microeconomics, Game theory and Public economics. 


At CERGE-EI I have cumulated 10 years of teaching experience at the Ph.D. level (all courses below are for a Ph.D. in economics). 

 

Thesis supervision:

 

At CERGE-EI, I advised or co-advised the following students (all Ph.D: supervision). 

Bill Appleman, graduation  6th December 2021, thesis title:  “Explorations into behavioral phenomena”. He will be on the market this academic year.

Michal Šoltés is about to defend (December 2021 or January 2022) his Ph.D. with a thesis ”Essays in Applied Economics”, and will be on the academic market.

Maxim Senkov will conclude his Ph.D. by the end of 2022.

Tomáš Miklánek, graduation 2017, I am listed as Local chair, as there was also an external chair. Tomaš is currently Assistant Professor a University of Economics in Prague.

Andrei Matveenko is  postdoc a University of Copenaghen.

Valei Azamat is senior researcher/ Docent at Ural federal University.

Oksana Oryshchyn, Leon Petani,   Iryna Hramiak, Olga Bichakova and Jelena Plazonja all successfully passed under my supervision both  DPW (dissertation proposal workshop) and the DW (dissertation workshop).

Jelena Plazonja is data scientist per MSD.

Georgi Burlakov is data scientist per MND.

 

At Ca’ Foscari  I have advised/I am advising the following students:

 

Matteo Tine graduated in 2021 (laurea triennale) with a thesis on “Leniency Programs”. He is currently enrolled in a master in economic research at the University of Cologne.

I am currently advising:

Two master thesis:  Marco Filippi (Firms, activism, and sustainability), and Federica Pozzobon (Game theory, experiments, and climate cooperation). Both should finish in the February/March session.

One bachelor thesis: Giuseppe Stocco (he has started to work on Game theory and Covid 19).

 

RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

 


Organization and participation as speaker to national and international conferences and workshops 

- Organizer of the first ESEI workshop on market design. 

Many of the leading experts in the field have participated. To name a few. Prof. Milgrom - now a Nobel prize winner, Prof. Klemperer, Prof. Jehiel, Prof. Goeree, and others), here is the complete program:

https://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/events/201210-market-design.pdf

- I regularly participate to international conference and get invitations to give talks (last 2 years this has not been the case due to covid).  

Below a selection of the ones in the last years:

Invited talks

Oxford (Nuffield College), University of Essex, Humboldt University (Berlin), Paris Dauphine, Lyon, Università Cattolica, University of Vienna, University of Bologna, University of Venice, Higher School of Economics, (Moscow), Nova School of Business (Lisbon), Erasmus University (Rotterdam), University of Queensland (Brisbane), UTS (Sydney) , UNSW (Sydney), WZB (Berlin), University of Florence, EIEF (Rome), University of Venice, University of Verona, Tinbergen Institute (University of Amsterdam), Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin. 

 


Selected Presentations at international conferences (from 2014)

EEA 2014 (Toulouse), ASFEE 2015 (Paris), EARIE 2014 (Milan), ESA 2014 (Prague), EEA 2015 (Mannheim), UECE Game Theory Meeting 2015 (Lisbon), ASSA meeting 2016 (Econometric society), RES 2016, ANZWEE 2016, Alghero Workshop 2017, EARIE 2017, RES 2018, EARIE 2018, ASSET 2018,  SAET 2019, EARIE 2019, Contests: Theory and evidence 2021 (Max Planck, Berlin). 

 


National and International Awards/Recognitions

- Fellow dell’ Agora centre for institutional, market and organizational design.

- Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow (nel 2017), at the European University Institute.

- Premo dal Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Economica per “Second Best Efficiency in Auction” (with Hernando-Veciana).

- Ente Luigi Einaudi Scholarship, 2003-2004.

- Scholarship Ronaldo Stringher, Bank of Italy, 2001-2003.

- Mario Landi Award (for bachelor thesis), , Amici di Villa Favard, University of Firenze, 2001-2002

 

Referee service:

Econometrica, Theoretical Economics, Review of Economic studies, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Economic Theory,  Games and Economic Behavior, The Economic Journal, Economic Theory, Journal of Mathematical economics, Mathematical Social Sciences, International Journal of Game Theory, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Review of Economic Design,  Economics Letters, Economics Bulletin, Bulletin of economic research, Czech Economic Review, Metroeconomica.

- External evaluator for the  Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada  (2015).

 


Funded Projects:

 


- Research support “Fondi primo insediamento”, Ca’ Foscari (2021-22).  The project presented  with which I gained this support is: “Media and Politics in a changing world.” , 5000 EUR.

- Grant Agency of the Czech Republic,  3 year grant (2020-2022) for the project: “Information Design in Contests” con Levent Celik, 3.708.000 CZK (roughly  145.000 EUR) 

- Fernand Braudel Fellowship (2017), 6000 EUR . 

- ECOCEP Grant (August- October 2016),  People Program (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program FP7/2007-2013/ under REA grant agreement number 609642. 6000 EUR

- Grant Agency of the Czech Republic,  3 year grant (2013-2015) for the project:  “Electoral Competition with Dynamic Campaign Contribution.” con Andrea Mattozzi. 1.767.000 CZK (roughly  70.000 EUR)

- Grant Agency of the Czech Republic , 3 year grant (2011-2013) for the project: “Behavioral Auction Design.” with Peter Katuščák. 2.022.000 CZK (roughly 80.000 EUR)

- Global Development  Network. “Behavioral Market Design”, with Miroslav Zajíček, 01/2011-06/2012. 14850 US

 


ACADEMIC AND ORGANIZATIONAL DUTIES                                                           

 


At CERGE-EI, I have served in many key duties for the department, such as:

- Director of Graduate studies (2017 and 2018):  

At CERGE-EI about 50 Ph.D. students are admitted, of which about 30 start the first year. The overall number of Ph.D. students to manage is therefore fairly large and there are many organizational challenges. 

- Committee of Graduate studies member. After ending the service above, I stayed in a small committee that helps the Director of graduate studies (till my departure for Venice).

- Member of the Executive and Supervisory committee di CERGE-EI (2017-2020).

The Executive and Supervisory board is the group that takes all key strategic decision for CERGE-EI, including tenure decisions. The group includes Nobel prize winners, and many other top economists.

- Hiring committee chair, job market year 2018-19 (both US and EU market).  

At CERGE-EI the hiring is centralized under the control of the hiring committee chair  who evaluates all applications (about 400 in my case), and does the first screening. Then he/she involves the other committee members and with their feedback a final selection is made. The chair also participates to all international markets (I went to Atlanta for the US one, and Naples for the EU one). After 40 interviews and 12 job talks, under my direction we hired 4 candidates: Ole Jann (Ph.D. Copenaghen, postdoc Oxford), Vasily Korovkin (Ph.D. UCLA), Martina Miotto (Ph.D. Warwick) and Pavel Kokourek (PhD. NYU).

- Hiring committee member.   As above, but without any organizing role.

- Placement officer  ( 2010-2016). I took care of Ph.D. students placement for a long time (mainly for the academic part). 

- Admission committee member (2010-2016).

I have screened for many years Ph.D. students applications. We had a few hundreds applications. 3 committee members were evaluating each of them separately.  

- Mobility Committee member (2014-2016).

I have helped students international mobility facilitating their access to top US programs (Princeton, NYU, and others).

- Seminar organizer (2010-2014). 

I have organized economic theory seminars from  2010 al 2014, inviting scholars from all over the world.

 


At Ca’ Foscari since my arrival  arrival in October 2019 I have already contributed with the following service:

 

- Coordinator  curriculum Economics QEM (since 2021). 

- Vice-Coordinator, QEM Joint Degree Master (since 2021) “Models and Methods of Quantitative Economics Methods” (QEM) together with Université Paris  1 - Sorbonne, Universitat  Autonoma de Barcellona, Université Catholique de Louvain, Warsaw School of Economics.

- Coordinator, Joint Degree Master (as of 2022)

- Admission committee member for international students QEM program  (2019-2020, 2020-2021).- Ph.D. committee member (collegio dottorato).

- Member of the teaching committee (collegio didattico) for the master in Economics and Finance.


- Co-organizer  of the departmental seminars (a.a 2020-2021 e 2021-2022 ). 


- Organizer of NEAT seminars (since October 2020). 

I have established a co-operation with colleagues at the University of Padua to jointly run a new seminar series, and other research activities (workshops, etc). We have our own website and a newsletter counting over 100 subscribers. 

Besides organizing the seminars, I manage the newsletter, and update/maintain the website.

The series has attracted top scholars. For more information, and to check past seminars see here:

https://www.unive.it/neat 


- Organizer of Job market seminars (a.a 2020-2021). 

I have organized job talks, and helped Prof. Dindo advertising our positions. Two of the colleagues hired this year, Valerio Dotti (coming from  Washington S. Louis) and Andrès Salamanca (coming from PSE) participated to these Job talks.

- Selection committee member for “Premi di Laurea Faini/Cazzavillan” (a.a 2019-2020). 

- President of the committee for  Premi di Laurea Faini/Cazzavillan (a.a 2020-2021). 

- Coordinator for the  Erasmus  program - Alicante exchange (since 2021). 

 

Participation in scientific committees:

 

- Member of the scientific committee for the conference ASSET 2018 (Association Southern European Theorist): https://www.disei.unifi.it/vp-321-committees.html

- Member of the scientific committee for the conference, Conference in Economic Design, of the Society for economic design 2022, https://sites.google.com/view/economicdesign22/home

 

PUBBLICATIONS IN INTERNATIONAL JOURNALS

 

- "Second Best Efficiency and The English Auction" with Anßgel Hernando Veciana, Games and Economic Behavior 73 (2011).

- "On the Optimality of not Allocating", with Angel Hernando-Veciana, Economics Letters 125 (2014). 

- "Does Feedback Really Matter in One-Shot First-Price Auctions? ",with Peter Katuščák and Miroslav Zajíček, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization,119 (2015).

- "Creating a Winner's Curse via Jump Bids", with David Ettinger, Review of Economic Design,20 (2016).

- "Hiding Information in Open Auctions with Jump Bids" with David Ettinger, Economic Journal, 126 (2016).

- "On the efficiency of the first price auction", with Angel Hernando-Veciana,  Economics Letters,  156, (2017).

- "Inefficient Rushes in Auctions", with Angel Hernando-Veciana, Theoretical Economics,13, (2018).

-  “Manipulating Information Revelation with Reserve Prices", with David Ettinger, Annals of Economics and Statistics, 133, (2019).

 

 

OTHER USEFUL INFORMATION

Lately, my research agenda has broadened. In particular, besides some project in my previous core area of auction and market design, I am currently working on information design, persuasion, contests, and I am in interested in applications to Political Economy, Media, Market for experts, and more. 

Working papers: 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

- "How to Boost Revenues in FPAs? The Magic of Disclosing only Winning bids from Past Auctions", with Philippe Jehiel and Peter Katuščák

We evaluate the revenue implications of two disclosure policies commonly available in auction design: Disclosure of all bids from past auctions and disclosure of winning bids only.The results from our experiment show that disclosing only the winning bids in first-price auctions with two bidders leads to higher bids and higher revenues in the long run. We explain the finding by the presence of a share of subjects (naive bidders) who fail to understand that the information they are provided with might come from a selected sample when only winning bids are disclosed. We provide a theoretical framework as well as a new method to estimate this share. The method also allows us to relate naïveté to risk aversion. We find that 57% of subjects are naive, and revenues are higher by 6% when only winning bids are disclosed. Our finding may provide a novel rationale as to why sellers rarely disclose losing bids in the field.

 

- “How to pick a Winner, with Andrea Mattozzi

We study a two-period model in which two agents of different and privately-known abilities compete for a single prize by exerting costly effort. A risk-neutral principal can affect the outcome of the contest by allocating resources to agents in each period, and her net payoff depends on the relative share allocated to the winner. We analyze how the principal optimal strategy depends on the severity of moral hazard. The results we derive are consistent with stylized facts regarding the dynamics of political campaign contributions and of third-party intervention in military conflicts.

Earlier version titled:"Electoral Competition with Dynamic Campaign Contributions" 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3014554 

 


- “Stimulating efforts by coarsening information”, with Levent Celik 

We examine the problem of a principal who wishes to maximize the total effort of two agents competing in a contest. The principal holds private information about which of the two agents is in an advantaged position (if any), and can control the coarseness of the disclosed information provided that the true state is contained in the disclosed set. We solve for the optimal disclosure policy under two alternative assumptions. First, in the spirit of the Bayesian persuasion literature, we assume that the principal can commit to a disclosure strategy before learning the true state. Second, we relax the commitment assumption. We show how the solution varies with the size of the cost of efforts and with the relative likelihood of different states.

 

 

Works in progress (those that are more preliminary are not listed):

 


- Selling and persuading with verifiable information (with Topi Miettinen). 

 

We study a model where two (biased) experts sell information to a unit mass of decision makers (heterogenous in their preference over a binary outcome). An interesting result we have already is that the information purchase decision of the decision makers can be non monotone in their preference: extreme decision makers not buying, more moderate buying from both experts, and the most moderate buying from one only.  What influence the quality of the information citizens/decision makers obtain is at the core of many discussion in the current public debate. The model we have set up can be extended in may directions and should be able to yield new insights to contribute to this discussion. 

 

Other works on auction theory:

- "Signaling in a private and common value environment” 

I study an auction setting where two bidders are asymmetrically informed regarding the realization of a common value component of the object on sale. The bidder with the ex-ante coarser information can become as well informed as the initially advantaged bidder, but at a cost. I analyze the incentives to place a pre-emptive bid that discourages information acquisition and how how said incentives vary with the relative size of the common component and on whether the informed bidder knows how her value decomposes into a private and a common value part or not. I also evaluate the effects of a jump bid on the auction's revenue and e efficiency.

- "Promoting Entry via Reserve Prices” 

I provide an example to show that the introduction of a reserve price may promote entry, increase social welfare, and in turn also induce higher revenues. The first two facts are in stark contrast with the relationship between reserve prices and entry pointed out by the literature. The setting I employ is one in which potential entrants face in equilibrium the possibility of ex post losses.