Browsing by Author "Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 43
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    Adversarial classification using signaling games with an application to phishing detection
    (2017) Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; L'Huillier, Gaston; Weber, Richard
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    Agregar o separar : estrategias de un monopolista bajo asimetría informacional.
    (2016) Villagra Morales, Matías Javier; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    Esta tesis estudia cuál es la estrategia de venta que maximiza el beneficio esperado de un monopolista que opera en un mercado en el que los consumidores comparten información sobre su tipo. Los resultados se han divido en dos partes: mercados grandes y pequeños. Cuando los mercados son grandes, se prueba que la estrategia óptima es que establezca un distribuidor y que este se encargue de proveer los bienes. Este resultado es válido para cualquier distribución continua no-negativa de creencias con tasa de riesgo creciente soportada sobre un conjunto convexo. Mientras que cuando el monopolista enfrenta mercados pequeños se presentan casos particulares y soluciones numéricas para valoraciones que distribuyen uniforme estándar y exponencial. Para ambas distribuciones se obtiene que es óptimo delegar la provisión de bienes a un distribuidor. Para mercados de tamaño arbitrario se presentan algunos resultados generales. Además, se estudian la eficiencia de asignación de los bienes, el bienestar de los agentes involucrados en el intercambio y la política de precios de cada estrategia de venta.
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    Consideraciones para el nuevo sistema de postulación y admisión a establecimientos educacionales en Chile
    (Centro de Políticas Públicas UC, 2016) Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés
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    Contratos laborales y capacitación : un mecanismo de negociación dinámico
    (2015) Velasco Hodgson, Nicolás Ignacio; Fosco, Constanza; Besfamille, Martin; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    El trabajo presenta un modelo de negociación de dos períodos entre una empresa y un trabajador. Los aspectos a negociar son tiempo de trabajo y de capacitación en cada período. La capacitación en un comienzo es costosa para ambos agentes, sin embargo permite aumentar la productividad del trabajador en el período siguiente. La empresa del primer período puede hacer mejor uso de esta mayor productividad, por lo que es eficiente que la relación contractual se mantenga en el segundo período. Sin embargo esto se dificulta a medida que el trabajador aumenta su productividad, pues aumenta su costo de oportunidad. En este sentido establecemos pagos que incentiven la inversión en capacitación al comienzo de la relación y que permitan que ambas partes sigan trabajando en conjunto. Para lograr este objetivo nos servimos de la literatura de diseño de mecanimos, lo que nos permite elaborar un protocolo de negociación compatible en incentivos y que satisface la restricción de participación voluntaria ex-post. Con esto es posible implementar asignaciones (trabajo y capacitación) socialmente eficientes todos los períodos. Por último encontramos que el mecanismo planteado requiere financiamiento externo, aunque se pueden realizar ajustes que permiten alcanzar un mecanismo que satisface ex-ante presupuesto equilibrado y ex-post presupuesto total equilibrado.
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    Contribution of social, spatial, and economic frictions to the socioeconomic school segregation : evidence from Chile
    (2019) Baloian Gacitúa, Anushka; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Asahi Kodama, Kenzo Javier; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    A growing body of research has shown that increasing freedom of school choice may lead to higher socioeconomic school segregation. However, the evaluation of related educational policies requires a deeper understanding of the channels through which parental choices impact on socioeconomic school segregation, and a measure of the contribution of each of those channels. I look at rankordered Pre-Kindergarten preferences of high socioeconomic status (SES) and low-SES parents to explore this interrogation. Through the simulation of multiple counterfactual scenarios regarding school applications and the school admission process, I quantify the contribution of social, spatial, and economic frictions to socioeconomic school segregation in Chile. While removing social frictions leads to a significant decrease in socioeconomic school segregation, removing spatial frictions does not. Finally, removing economic frictions to all types of students leads to a significant increase in the levels of segregation due to highly congested school applications and heterogeneous preferences of high-SES and low-SES parents concerning school attributes.
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    Discounts as a Barrier to Entry
    (2016) Montero Ayala, Juan Pablo; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés
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    Diseño de mecanismo eficiente con adquisición de información dinámica
    (2015) Mesías Moreno, Jorge Andrés; Besfamille, Martin; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Fosco, Constanza; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    Este trabajo aborda un problema de asignación de bienes cuando los demandantes no conocen el bien en cuestión, lo que hace que no conozcan su verdadera valoración por el objeto. De esta situación, sumado a la restricción de una experimentación por periodo, surge el problema de adquisición de información de manera dinámica. Tres principales resultados se entregan a lo largo del trabajo. Primero, es posible caracterizar un orden eficiente siempre cuando los individuos se diferencian en priors, lo que no ocurre cuando la diferenciación es en costos de adquirir información. Segundo, es posible caracterizar la adquisición de información de un proceso con un número finito de familias diferentes en priors, tal que en el tiempo se adquiere cada vez menos información y no todas las familias disponibles experimentan. Tercero, existe un mecanismo ex-post eficiente, cuando las valoraciones de los agentes son interdependientes.
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    Diseño de mecanismos para agentes con preferencias opuestas
    (2022) Jara Nahuelhual, Rubén Andrés; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Silva, Francisco Andre Alves da; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    En esta investigación se analiza un modelo de arbitraje donde dos agentes están interesados en un bien (indivisible). Los agentes reciben información privada, reportan un mensaje relacionado a un planificador social y este último diseña una asignación para distribuir el bien. Mostramos que cuando el conjunto de mensajes que pueden reportar los agentes es de cardinalidad dos, entonces existe una asignación no constante que satisface las restricciones de compatibilidad de incentivos si y solo si la información que reciben los agentes es independiente. Luego, se ilustra que la existencia de asignaciones no constantes pueden aumentar el bienestar social en algunos contextos. Finalmente, demostramos que cuando el conjunto de mensajes que pueden reportar los agentes es de cardinalidad mayor a dos, entonces si las señales de los agentes se distribuyen independientemente existe una asignación no constante que satisface las restricciones de compatibilidad de incentivos. Sin embargo, en este último caso, la existencia de una asignación no constante compatible con incentivos no implica que la información de los agentes sea independiente.
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    Education, crime and violence: evidence of interventions in developing countries
    (2018) Dinarte Díaz, Lelys Ileana; Martínez Alvear, Claudia; Lafortune, Jeanne; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    This dissertation contains three essays on crime, violence, and education in the frame of development economics. The first two chapters study how specific educational interventions and the way they are implemented can determine students’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, including socio-emotional skills and violent behavior. Finally, the last chapter explores how providing public infrastructure in developing countries can drive some unintended short-term effects on their economic development.
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    Effects of asymmetric information on airport congestion management mechanisms
    (2019) Aravena, Olivia; Basso, Leonardo J.; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés
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    Essays in income tax evasion
    (2022) Castillo Ramos, Sebastián; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Besfamille, Martin; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    Governments recurrently come back to ask the best way to increase tax collection, based on constant necessities to increase its spending. Generally, increasing tax collection is associated with a tax raise, mainly motivated by the agent’s mechanical responses, i.e., assuming that taxpayers do not adjust their taxable income. However, the behavioral response (the adjustment in the agent’s taxable income, for instance) produces a variety of consequences in different markets. Indeed, a rise in taxes changes the evasion’s gains altering the incentives to participate in occupations with higher evasion facilities. This thesis is devoted to studying this issue throughout two chapters. Each of these chapters inquires over the consequences of the tax policy in contexts where tax evasion and occupational decision coexist. The first chapter studies the causal effect of income tax evasion on self-employment decisions. We develop a theoretical model to disentangle the mechanisms behind this effect when the marginal tax rate changes. Then, we obtain a proxy of tax evasion using a consumption-based approach at the household level using data for Chile. To identify the causal effect of income tax evasion, we use two advantages from the Chilean setting. First, it establishes equal marginal tax rates across self-employed and wage-earners isolating the evasion channel. Secondly, we exploit a marginal tax reform that affects agents given their pre-reform taxable income. We obtain two behavioral parameters using a difference-in-difference approach. Firstly, the elasticity of evasion to marginal tax rate equals 1.4. Also, we find that an increase of 1 percentage point in the evasion rate raises the probability of being self-employed by 6.1 percentage points, with a semi-elasticity of 0.16. We also show that the evasion channel explains 99.73% of the effect of taxes on self-employment decisions. Finally, we document that the deadweight loss associated with the tax reform is between 2.82 - 3.01% depending on the tax compliance policy. Moreover, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate that not considering evasion in this measure produces a biased estimation of the tax effect on welfare. The second chapter incorporates occupational decisions into the hierarchical model of Sanchez and Sobel (1993) to investigate distortions in tax policies design: the audit function, a linear marginal tax rate, and the IRS budget. In this economy, evasion is only possible in the self employment sector. The optimal audit is efficient below a cut-off level, and above this level, are equal to zero. This result is held under two extensions: the audit cost is monotonically nondecreasing in the self-employment wage, and the fine rate rises in self-employment wage but is bounded from above. The marginal tax rate is smaller than one, indicating that not considering occupational decisions produces an upward bias on taxes. The optimal IRS budget does not allow auditing the entire self-employment sector, but it is larger than the result from a cost-benefit analysis. Finally, differential taxation is optimal if the marginal tax rate in the self-employment sector is higher than the dependent sector. This result produces that the distortions in the optimal allocation of agents increase compared to an environment with one marginal tax rate.
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    Essays in information acquisition and campaign finance
    (2021) Sauma Webb, Mauricio José; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
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    Expropriation : A Mechanism Design Approach.
    (2020) Jiménez Gimpel, Vicente Antonio; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Montero Ayala, Juan Pablo; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    This paper studies the problem of an agent that needs to buy a fixed amount of units from multiple firms with private information regarding their costs of production. We characterize the optimal —cost minimizing— mechanism using the classical mechanism design approach and it turns out to be difficult to implement in practice. Consequently, we present two alternatives of a sequential nature that are more easily implementable: the familiar sequential posted prices scheme and a novel “sequentially optimal” mechanism. We characterize these mechanisms and show through numerical analysis that the latter tends to closely approximate the expected cost of the optimal mechanism, while the former performs much worse. The results have natural applications to several issues faced by a government, for example, the problem of buying back (“expropriating”) pollution permits in order to meet an international environmental agreement.
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    Fare Evasion and Monopoly Regulation
    (2022) Besfamille, Martin; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Guzmán, León
    We consider the regulation of a monopoly facing consumers that may evade payments, an important issue in public utilities. To maximize total surplus, the regulator sets the price and socially costly transfers, ensuring that the monopoly breaks-even. With costly effort, the firm can deter evasion. Under unit demand and fixed quality, price is independent of marginal cost, but increasing in the marginal cost of public funds. When quality is endogenous, we find sufficient conditions that imply a non-monotonic relation between price and marginal cost of public funds. We extend the model to consider non-unit demand and moral hazard.
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    Incentivos frente a una adopción tecnológica : ¿cómo cambia el comportamiento de los médicos?
    (2020) Barrueto Silva, Eduardo Alfonso; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Celhay, Pablo; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    This paper do a theoretical and empirical analysis on how the behaviour of licentious doctors change after an intervention from FONASA. We exploit a rich dataset provided by FONASA that allow us to determine different outcomes that we will use to conclude the behaviour of doctors. We found heterogeneous behaviour between licentios and non licentious doctors, but not only that, we also found that this heterogeneous behaviour also appears on how we define licentious, where pre-intervention and post-intervention licentious group will behave differently. The principal results are that pre intervenrtion doctors reacts by fear after the intervention, where the number of licenses decrease and adoption increase. On the other hand, licentious doctors after the intervention, increase the number of licenses after restrictions and there is a territorial expansion after trimester 16.
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    Información conjuntamente verificable en un problema de agencia
    (2018) Croquevielle Rendic, Juan Andrés; Besfamille, Martin; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    Un principal posee un objeto, y puede dárselo a un agente. Este último desea obtenerlo, y conoce la utilidad que obtendría su contraparte si decide entregarlo, mientras que esto es incierto para el principal. No obstante, existe un test que revela información significativa para este último. Dicha prueba es costosa para estos individuos, y su realización requiere de la aprobación de ambos. Se muestra que, si el test es infalible, el mecanismo óptimo depende del costo que significa la verificación para el principal, así como de sus creencias a priori acerca del tipo del agente. Si la verificación es defectuosa, las decisiones óptimas del principal están fuertemente ligadas a la magnitud del ruido, y al costo en que incurre el agente al realizar el test. En base a estos elementos, puede convenirle dar el objeto a todo evento, sin hacer el test; o bien puede ser óptimo informarse siempre antes de entregar el bien.
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    Information acquisition in an all-pay auction contest
    (2023) Barrientos Barrientos, Agustín Orlando; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Heumann, Tibor; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    We develop a two-player all-pay auction model where an incumbent competes with an entrant. The incumbent’s valuation is publicly known, whereas the entrant’s valuation is unknown but has a publicly known prior distribution. However, before competing in the all-pay auction, the entrant can acquire additional information about his valuation through a learning experiment. This experiment enables him to learn his valuation perfectly, but we also allow for intermediate levels of information. We find that the entrant maximizes his expected payoff by perfectly learning his valuation. Furthermore, the entrant has a greater willingness to pay for information when competing against an incumbent with a similar ex-ante valuation, and a lesser willingness to pay for information when competing against a stronger or weaker incumbent. Nonetheless, the entrant is less willing to pay for information when he competes with a weaker incumbent than a stronger one. We then test the robustness of these results and find that the entrant’s perfect learning outcome is robust only for certain incumbent valuations.
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    Information acquisition in the context of a centralized school admission system
    (2021) Correa Besoain, Felipe Antonio; Asahi Kodama, Kenzo Javier; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    In the context of a centralized school admission system—specifically a Deferred Acceptance- we study the process of information acquisition over the quality of a school. Under the assumption of homogeneous agents in everything except on their cost for acquiring information, we analyze the different equilibriums that can arise and how they differ from what a Social Planner does. We present two versions of the model, one where the agents' valuations over the school are independent of each other, and a second where agents have common valuations over the school. In the first model, we find both positive and negative externalities of the agents' information acquisition. The result depends on what the uninformed agents prefer to do. In the second one, the behavior of the uninformed agents' is endogenous to the model because of what we call the ``curse of the uninformed", produced by those with small information acquisition costs taking advantage of that, and avoiding the school when it is of bad quality; giving those who do not acquire a greater probability of being selected in that case. There, in almost all cases, we found negative externalities from the acquisition of information. This work suggests that, under certain conditions of the uninformed agents' behavior, when the preferences over schools are horizontally differentiated, there could be gains if a central authority implements policies to reduce the information's cost. However, if the agents' valuations are common, it is difficult to improve the aggregate welfare by making information cheaper. In almost all cases, it will make aggregate welfare fall. Making those with the highest cost worse off.
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    Job market signaling, information acquisition, and competition
    (2022) Schmitz Condeza, Lucas Sebastián; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Heumann, Tibor; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    A worker, privately informed about his different and general skills sends a costly signal. Two firms, after observing the signal, decide to invest in information acquisition and then bid in a second-price auction. We assume that firms acquire information about different skills. In equilibrium, firms bid as if they had acquired two pieces of information despite that they acquire only one. Information differentiation allows firms to sidestep the Bertrand paradox and have positive utilities. We also discuss why information differentiation makes sense from the firms’ point of view. We discuss extensions where we test the robustness of our results.
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    "Know thyself": information design with elusive receivers
    (2021) Díaz Titelman, Viviana; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Montero, Juan Pablo; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    In some contexts, agents might be uncertain on how their chosen actions payoff. On the other side of the market, firms can use this uncertainty to induce their preferred actions. We develop a dynamic principal-agent model in which the agent strategically chooses whether or not (and to what extent) to inform herself on an unknown parameter of her utility function. Information on this parameter is valued tomorrow but is costly today. We find that for certain prior beliefs of said parameter, information acquisition is optimal. The principal has an objective function that depends on the agent's decision and knows the agent's optimal strategy. So, he intervenes in her chosen actions by designing distributions of posterior beliefs. In particular, we explore three instruments for the principal that determine (i) the precision of the information the agent acquires and (ii) the chances that the agent chooses to get informed.