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Andy

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Andriy (Andy) Zapechelnyuk

School of Economics

University of Edinburgh

31 Buccleuch Place

Edinburgh EH8 9JT

United Kingdom

Location: 31 Buccleuch Place, Room 4.01

Email: azapech (ατ) gmail.com

Phone: Microsoft Teams

I am a Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh. I serve as an Associate Editor for Econometrica and Economic Theory/ETB. My research interests lie in the field of microeconomic theory and applications, focusing on communication and information design, optimal contracts, and robust decision theory.

Short Bio: I got a PhD from Stony Brook University in 2005. Before landing at Edinburgh in 2022, I spent some time as a researcher at the Center for the Study of Rationality (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (University of Bonn), and I have taught at Kyiv School of Economics, Queen Mary University of London, University of Glasgow, and University of St Andrews.

Curriculum Vitae

Google Scholar profile

Working Papers

‣ Fair hiring procedures (with Karl Schlag)

[previously titled "Fair sequential search"; absorbed an earlier working paper "Value of information when searching for a secretary"]

In hiring, fair treatment concerns not only the assessment of candidates, but also the process of interviewing and selecting candidates. The latter, so-called procedural fairness, is investigated in this paper using a model of sequential search. We postulate that a hiring procedure is fair if it does not discriminate interviewed candidates by the order in which they are interviewed. We show that procedurally fair hiring prescribes to accept the first candidate who belongs to a prespecified set. Fairness comes at a relatively small cost. The optimal value of hiring without this constraint is at most twice as large.

‣ Are there "Ratatouille" restaurants? On anticorrelation of food quality and hygiene (with Hisayuki Yoshimoto)

We study the empirical relationship between restaurants' efforts to maintain hygiene standards and their food quality scores, as provided by both professional reviewers and consumers. We first propose a flexible microeconomic model of product quality generation, in which the observed quality scores are Poisson-generated from the effort made by the firms. The first-order condition of a firm's profit maximization is used as a Poisson regression equation that relates two different aspects of product quality evaluation scores, hygiene and food quality. Then, by using data from the UK high-end restaurants, we show that this relationship is negative and statistically significant. This finding is robust across various model specifications and food quality measurements. It indicates that a higher food quality is generally associated with less effort to keep the kitchen clean. We find that 3% of Michelin-starred restaurants in our dataset have poor hygiene, while the same is true for only 2% of non-Michelin-starred restaurants. Our findings illuminate potential channels through which the anticorrelation between food quality and hygiene effort could be mitigated and can be helpful for hygiene inspectors in order to prioritize restaurants in their inspection schedule.

‣ Persuasion under insufficient reason (with Anton Kolotilin) [Slides]

A sender designs how to disclose information about the state of the world to persuade a receiver to accept a proposal. The sender is ignorant about both the receiver's type and his risk attitude. The sender applies the principle of maximum entropy to resolve her ignorance. We show that the maximum-entropy utility is risk neutral if nothing is known about the agent's utility, and it is CARA if the average utility is known. Furthermore, the optimal signal is either fully revealing or completely uninformative if nothing is known about the distribution of the agent's type, or if its mean is known; the optimal signal is a censorship if the mean and variance are known. To derive our results, we propose a novel representation of preference over lotteries.

‣ Bargaining under incomplete information with the help of delay (with Karl Schlag)

We study bargaining under incomplete information, with applications to trade and to provision of public good. In our setting, agents not only agree on how they share their output, but also on how much output they produce. We are interested in bargaining rules that do not depend on priors. We find a unique rule that satisfies a set of axioms. Under this rule, the higher the surplus, the more output is produced. Moreover, the produced output is shared as in the Nash bargaining solution. We present a dynamic protocol that implements this rule for any priors. Heterogeneous discount factors and degrees of risk aversion can be included.

‣ Persuasion meets delegation (with Anton Kolotilin)

A principal can restrict an agent's information (the persuasion problem) or restrict an agent's discretion (the delegation problem). We show that these problems are generally equivalent — solving one solves the other. We use tools from the persuasion literature to generalize and extend many results in the delegation literature, as well as to address novel delegation problems, such as monopoly regulation with a participation constraint.

‣ Competing e-commerce intermediaries (with Alexander Matros)

We consider a model where two e-commerce platforms, such as internet auctions, compete for sellers who are heterogeneous in their time preferences. Contrary to the literature which argues that if two platforms coexist in equilibrium, then the “law of one price” must hold, we demonstrate that two platforms may set different prices and have positive equilibrium profits by exploiting heterogeneity of sellers' time preferences. In such an equilibrium less patient sellers choose the more popular, but more expensive, platform, while more patient sellers prefer the less popular and cheaper one.