AYUSH PANT

 

RESEARCH

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PUBLICATIONS

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THE NEWSROOM DILEMMA with Federico Trombetta, Economic Inquiry, June 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.13296

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Conventional wisdom suggests that competition in the modern digital environment pushes media outlets toward the early release of less accurate information. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Two opposing forces determine the resolution of the speed-accuracy tradeoff: preemption and reputation. Although competition exacerbates preemption concerns, it provides additional information to the audience by allowing them to compare publication times. Hence, more competitive environments may be more conducive to reputation building, which may lead to better reporting. However, we show that the audience may be worse off due to the outlets' better initial information.​

 

WORKING PAPERS​​

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EFFECTIVE SUPERVISION with Zeinab Aboutalebi 

(Previously titled "Feedback on Ideas")

Status: Resubmitted after "Reject and Resubmit"

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We study how supervisors influence experimentation when feedback is unverifiable and they hold private information about the agent's ability. In our dynamic cheap talk model, an agent repeatedly generates ideas and chooses one to implement, while a supervisor provides feedback on ideas. Supervision follows a three-region pattern: at low beliefs, no informative feedback arises; at high beliefs, feedback is effective but signals are irrelevant; and at intermediate beliefs, the supervisor's signal is pivotal, shaping experimentation paths and raising success probability under supervisors with stronger signals and beliefs. The results disentangle the roles of agent and supervisor beliefs in shaping performance.​​

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DISCLOSURE OF DYNAMIC TESTS with Zeinab Aboutalebi

Status: Updated draft being created for resubmission ​

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We analyze how a revenue-maximizing intermediary designs, prices, and sets disclosure rules of tests where a sender signals quality through repeated testing. The intermediary opts for either a non-discretionary regime, revealing all outcomes, or a discretionary one, allowing the sender to conceal results. We find that non-discretionary disclosure leads to higher revenue when both sender types participate. The key insight is that disclosure constraints influence test design: concealable failures necessitate more difficult tests, reducing willingness to pay, while observable failures permit easier tests, enabling higher prices. Our result serves as a benchmark for real-world certification mechanisms.

 

​WORK IN PROGRESS

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OPTIMAL WORKLOAD IN DIVERSE TEAMS

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I study how workloads should be optimally shared in two-person teams when uniquely implementing effort in all the required tasks for a project to succeed. Diversity is modeled as ex-ante differences in the prior beliefs about the efficiency of the agents in performing the required tasks. I find that despite the tasks being complementary, the principal requires both agents to take on a positive share of the workload. Moreover, the principal should assign more tasks to the agent who is ex-ante believed to be less cost-efficient in performing the tasks. 

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PERSUASION THROUGH CONTENT DESIGN with Srijita Ghosh​

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We consider a model of strategic communication between a content creator (sender) and a decision-maker, DM (receiver). The content creator designs content that has both informational value and engagement value for the DM. The DM decides whether to engage with the content or opt for an outside option. The content provides a utility value to the DM and changes her belief. Following this stage, the DM chooses to pay further attention to uncover the state. We find that there exists a cutoff point for the DM's prior belief (about the content creator's type) below which the CC maximally uses the engagement value and above which he chooses the minimum value. Furthermore, the information content decreases with the level of prior belief of DM about the content creator's type. The communication value allows content creators to manipulate the belief of the DM even when the prior belief is sufficiently low. Thus, the engagement value introduces a new channel through which the content creator can manipulate the DM's strategy and payoff. ​​​​​

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