Stability as a Right to a Counsel of Choice: Lawyers' Matching Problem (joint with Kemal Kivanc Akoz, Emre Dogan and Onur Kesten)
Games and Economic Behavior (2025)
We study pairwise-stable matchings of lawyers to indigent litigants. In this setting a negative externality arises: assigning a better lawyer to a litigant harms the opposing litigant and their lawyers. We characterize conditions under which stable matchings exist, and show that they correspond to situations in which the cases are primarily differentiated by the advantage they give to one of the sides, but some cases attract more media attention than others. We show that in any stable matching strong lawyers face weak opponents. We show that pairwise-stable matchings are efficient, but may not belong to the core.
JEL: C78, D62
Should lawyers lie to their clients? Biased expertise in negotiations
(previous title: "Negotiations, Expertise and Strategic Misinformation")American Law and Economics Review (2025)
A plaintiff suffers harm of random value from a defendant. The informed defendant proposes a settlement to the uninformed plaintiff who additionally receives cheap-talk advice from her informed attorney. The attorney can be biased towards or against a trial. A small bias against the trial does not change the outcome of the negotiation. A small bias towards the trial improves the outcome for the plaintiff. The bias may depend on the contract signed by the plaintiff and the attorney. When, the costs of litigation for the plaintiff are large, and the value of the harm is likely to be large, a contingency fee contract is signed and the attorney is biased against the trial. Otherwise, an hourly fee contract is signed and the attorney is biased for the trial. Contracts resulting in no bias are never signed.
Old version of the paper (with continuous liability value) and its Online Appendix
JEL: D82, D83, D86, K41
Trust and and the Dynamics of Network Formation (joint with: Juan Camilo Cardenas, Davide Pietrobon, Tomás Rodríguez Barraquer, and Tatiana Velasco)
Network Science (2026)
We study whether trust towards strangers is a determinant of social networks among an incoming cohort of first-year undergraduate students. We employ an experiment and survey questions to measure students' trust before they have substantial chances to meet and socialize. After four months, during which the students have many opportunities to interact, we elicit five networks capturing different relationships between them. The students' initial levels of trust do not significantly predict the relationships they formed after four months. In contrast, time of exposure, similarity in socioeconomic status, and hometown are relevant determinants of relationship formation.
JEL: C80, D85, D90, D91, Z13
Lawyer Assignment with Congestion: Redesigning the Comal County Pilot Program (joint with Emre Dogan and Onur Kesten)
R & R: American Economic Journal: Microeconomics
The U.S. system for assigning public lawyers to indigent defendants denies choice to manage congestion. A pilot program in Comal County, Texas, granting choice caused overcrowding among popular lawyers. We propose implementing efficient and mobility-free assignments where no defendant prefers to unilaterally switch lawyers. Such assignments always exist and, when feasible, match the unique envy-free allocation. While pilot’s mechanism is obviously manipulable, no mobility-free mechanism is, and gains from manipulation are limited. We develop efficient and mobility-free congestion-cutting mechanisms, and offer a practical design preserving choice while guaranteeing defendants prioritizing congestion-level over lawyer identity are never assigned to overburdened lawyers.
JEL: C78, D62
Adversarial Career Concerns: Theory and Evidence on Lawyers' Career Trajectories (joint with Rosa Ferrer)
Adversarial win--loss outcomes imply jointly determined performance, such that individual performance cannot be fully disentangled (e.g., opposing lawyers’ court performance). This paper develops a theoretical framework and presents empirical evidence on the career-concern incentives and market learning generated by such environments. A central feature of adversarial settings is that the informativeness of performance is endogenous to the confrontation itself. Regardless of the functional form of the outcome, implicit incentives depend on the degree of symmetry between opponents. Incentives weaken in more balanced settings because outcomes become less informative about talent, increasing the likelihood that noise determines the winner. In equilibrium, uneven learning generates asymmetric reputational rewards, affecting relative effort incentives and potentially increasing aggregate effort.
Empirically, we use panel data on young lawyers to study career trajectories consistent with substantial implicit incentives, particularly early in lawyers’ careers. We exploit institutional features generating asymmetric career concerns between opposing parties in personal injury litigation, a setting in which attorneys typically specialize on either the plaintiff or defense side. Consistent with stronger reputational rewards from observable performance on the plaintiff side, plaintiff lawyers exhibit greater earnings dispersion, a stronger association between performance and career outcomes, and stronger early-career effort incentives. More broadly, the paper bridges two previously separate strands of research—employer learning and career concerns—by showing how dispersion in residual earnings growth is associated with early-career effort choices.
JEL: D80, J24, J44, K41, L14
Incentivizing Public Lawyers and Enhancing Fairness via Sorting in Adversarial Systems (joint with Kemal Kivanc Akoz, Emre Dogan, and Behrang Kamali)
In the American adversarial system, case outcomes significantly depend on the efforts of opposing lawyers. We explore the impact of matching public attorneys with prosecutors on effort incentives and welfare. Negative assortative matching (NAM) between attorneys and prosecutors results in the most egalitarian distribution of efforts across cases, but discriminates among identical defendants. Positive assortative matching reduces discrimination while maximizing overall effort. Allowing defendants to choose counsel, as in inquisitorial European systems, leads to a stable matching, which is NAM. Consequently, adopting such a system could adversely affect incentives and, paradoxically, the welfare distribution of indigent defendants in the U.S.
JEL: C78, D62
Effects of choosing advisor on financial decision making (joint with: Lixuan Zhao)
We examine how the choice of advisor influences decision-making under uncertainty through a lab experiments. Participants were tasked with constructing a portfolio from three assets, where one asset was first-order stochastically dominated by a combination of the other two. The control group made decisions without any advice, while the treatment group selected advisors from a popular finance self-help social media platform. Our findings indicate that exposure to advice led to reduced and less frequent investments in the stochastically dominated asset, albeit with increased overall risk exposure. Ultimately, the option to choose advisors positively impacted both self-reported and simulated welfare.
JEL: C91, D81, G41
Dynamics of Collective Litigation (joint with Andrés Espitia De la Hoz )
In collective litigations the outcome of the trial may depend on the number of litigants. In this paper, we study how collectives form and explore actions that the defendant can take to interfere in this process. We propose a dynamic model of litigation in which a defendant faces the arrival of plaintiffs over time and where the defendant is privately informed about the scope of the harm she has caused (e.g. how many consumers have been exposed to a defective product). We show that when all plaintiffs are strategic the defendant can completely avoid the formation of a collective. However, if some plaintiffs (exogenously) join the collective then strategic plaintiffs may also join. We compare the baseline, in which all settlements are public, to a setting where the privacy of settlements is endogenous. We show that use of private settlements can decrease expected payments for some plaintiffs but may increase payments to subsequent ones. The defendant gains on the possibility of settling the case secretly only if the plaintiffs prior about the scope of the harm is low.
JEL: D82, D83, K41