Designing Admissible Experiments by Justus Preusser

Join us for another event in the Microeconomics Research Seminar Series, Autumn Term 2025.

Justus Preusser, from Bocconi University, will present this week's Microeconomics Seminar on Designing Admissible Experiments.

Abstract

A principal relies on a decision-maker to take action. The decision-maker is persuaded by a biased experimenter. Anticipating persuasion, the principal can constrain the informativeness of admissible experiments. We cast this situation as delegated experimentation with moral hazard. The principal proposes a set of feasible experiments. The experimenter can garble any feasible experiment. We focus on posterior-mean preferences for all parties, with S-shaped preferences for the experimenter. The principal optimally makes the most informative experiments unavailable, despite the principal’s preference for information. Our main result characterizes which kind of information to optimally restrict: the principal pools an intermediate interval of states, thereby inducing the experimenter to disclose higher, more pivotal states. Applications include judicial processes, communication within organizations, and regulatory approval.

This seminar will be held in the Economics Common Room on Monday 24 November at 4.00pm. This event is open to all levels of study and is also open to the public.

To register your place and gain access to the webinar, please contact the seminar organisers.

This event is part of the Microeconomics Research Seminar Series.