Jun 22, 2021; Course of talks
Distinguished Research Fellows 2021: Award Ceremony Michalis Drouvelis (University of Birmingham)
In this Award Ceremony Professor Michalis Drouvelis from the University of Birmingham is awarded as on of the Distinguished Research Fellows 2021. In his research talk he gives insights in his current research as well as a quick outlook regarding the Fellow project that he wants to work on at the TU Dresden together with the Chair of Public Economics (Prof. Dr. Marcel Thum).
The Award Ceremony will be conducted online. The link to the zoom conference is available at: https://tu-dresden.de/bu/wirtschaft/forschung/distinguished-research-fellowships/award-ceremonies-2021
About Michalis Drouvelis:
Michalis is a Professor of Behavioural Economics at the University of Birmingham, Department of Economics. Before coming to Birmingham, he was part of the experimental centres at the University of York, and the University of Nottingham.
Michalis' research interests lie in the area of behavioural and experimental economics. Recent research has focused on social preferences, on voluntary cooperation in the presence of free rider incentives, on expression of emotions and on coordination games. His work has been published in Games & Economic Behavior, Journal of Public Economics, European Economic Review, Journal of Economic Psychology, Experimental Economics, Theory and Decision, Southern Economic Journal, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics and Economics Letters. Michalis is also affiliated with CESifo (Munich) and serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization and Coordinating Editor for Theory and Decision.
More information
About the joint research project:
Delegation characterizes many aspects of economic activities and has become a critical tool in modern business and organizations. In many organizational settings, decisions are delegated to third-party agents for a variety of reasons. For example, standard economic analysis of the principal-agent relationship suggests that principals are assumed to hire agents because delegation confers efficiency gains, as the agent either possesses special ability or has a lower opportunity cost of time or effort. Delegation may also exhibit a strategic dimension, for instance when the agent can credibly carry out tougher negotiations than the principal. The main focus of this research project is to gain a better understanding of principal-agent relationships by designing mechanisms that enable these advantages to be realized despite the fact that agents typically face different incentives and possess different information than the principals who employ them. In this project, we plan to extend the theoretical contribution by Konrad and Thum (2020, JPubET) by designing an experiment, which will examine the role of delegation in an ultimatum bargaining context. We consider ultimatum bargaining between a seller and a buyer of an asset who know each other's valuation of the asset. However, both can defer their decisions to delegates who have opaque preferences. We want to investigate whether players use this tool of delegation to opaque delegates strategically and to what extent it leads to an inefficient breakdown of negotiations.