Deepal Basak
https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/dbasak/home
deepal.basak@nyu.edu
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Address
19 West Fourth St., 6th Floor
New York, NY 10012-1119
Phone
212-998-8900 (office)
646-318-4423 (home)
Placement Director: Professor Alberto Bisin
Graduate Administrator: Marjorie Lesser
alberto.bisin@nyu.edu
212-998-8916
marjorie.lesser@nyu.edu
212-998-8923
Education
PhD. In Economics, New York University, 2010-2016 (expected)
Thesis Title: Transparency and Delay in Bargaining
M.S. In Quantitative Economics, Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, 2008-2010
B. Sc In Economics, Mathematics, Statistics, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, 2005-2008
References
Professor David Pearce
Professor Ennio Stacchetti
19 West Fourth St., 6th Floor
19 West Fourth St., 6th Floor
New York, NY 10012-1119
New York, NY 10012-1119
212-992-8779 (office)
212-998-8964 (office)
david.pearce@nyu.edu
ennio.stacchetti@nyu.edu
Professor Joyee Deb
Professor Laurent Mathevet <4th is optional>
Evans Hall, 3475, 165 Whitney Ave
19 West Fourth St., 6th Floor
New Haven, CT 065114
New York, NY 10012-1119
203-436-9652 (office)
212-998-8934 (office)
joyee.deb@yale.edu
lmath@nyu.edu
Research Fields
Primary fields: Micro Economic Theory
Secondary fields: Applied Theory - Information Economics, Financial Economics, Psychology and
Economics, Empirical Industrial Organization
Research Experience
Spring, 2014; Fall, 2014
Research Assistant to professor Xavier Gabaix at NYU Stern for
‘A Sparsity-Based Model of Bounded Rationality’
Summer, 2014; Summer, 2015;
Fall, 2015
Research Assistant to professor David Pearce at NYU for
‘Bargaining under Imperfect Information’
Spring, 2015
Research Assistant to professor Xavier Gabaix at NYU Stern for
‘Optimal Taxation with Behavioral Agents’ (joint work with
Emmanuel Farhi)
Teaching Experience
Fall, 2012; Spring, 2013 and
Fall, 2013
Undergraduate Statistics at NYU, teaching fellow for professor
Xiaochen Fan
Honors, Scholarships, and Fellowships
2010-2015
Henry M. MacCracken fellowship
2014
C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, NYU - Travel grant
for conference at ISI, New Delhi
2010
Award for securing the top rank at Indian Statistical Institute,
New Delhi
2008-2010
Indian Statistical Institute fellowship
2008
Nihil Ultra award for academic excellence in Science,
St. Xaviers College, Kolkata
Research Papers
Transparency and Delay in Bargaining (Job Market Paper)
Abstract: This paper studies the Rubinstein bargaining game, in which both agents have
reservation values. Agents are uncertain whether their opponents have high or low reservation
values. Each agent tries to convince the other that he has a high reservation value, resulting in a
unique war of attrition, as in the reputation literature. I analyze the information sensitivity of
delay when agents publicly observe some noisy signal about their opponents' reservation values.
A bargaining environment is said to be more transparent if the available information is more
precise. I show that information disclosure increases delay, in the sense of first-order stochastic
dominance, if transparency is not sufficiently high. Suppose, a mediator controls this
transparency. Although full transparency is efficient, a bargaining environment is not likely to be
fully transparent. I characterize the optimal transparency when a bargaining environment can be
made transparent only to a limited extent. Also, given any transparency, I show that a mediator
can strictly improve efficiency by disclosing information about an agent iff agents have
sufficiently close bargaining strengths.
Diffusing Coordination Risk (with Zhen Zhou)
Abstract: Panic-based bank runs can happen when depositors make their withdrawal decisions
simultaneously. By imposing a withdrawal limit, one can prevent depositors from rushing to
withdraw all their funds on one date. This partitions each individual's decision, thereby inducing
a coordination game with dynamic payoff externalities. The information about whether the bank
has survived all withdrawals so far is revealed publicly. We show that if the withdrawal limit is
sufficiently small, depositors ignore their private information and coordinate on this public
news, once they reach the last node. We use a backward inductive argument to show that
depositors who anticipate that no one will withdraw their funds later do not withdraw earlier
either. Thus, any solvent bank can be made immune to self-fulfilling runs. By a similar
argument, sufficiently asynchronous debt structures could overcome rollover risk. We formalize
this policy in a dynamic global game of regime change and show that a sufficiently diffused
policy unravels the coordination risk from the end.
Haggling with Psychological Preferences
A buyer and a seller haggle over the price of a good with known value. But there is an
underlying state, which is either boom - i.e., favors the seller; or recession - i.e., favors the
buyer. Nature selects a state and tells the agents privately with positive probability, inducing
higher-order uncertainty. The agents have psychological preferences, in the sense that if an agent
knows that the state favors him, he sets a high reservation value. A unique equilibrium emerges
in which the agents pretend to know the state favors them. Agreement is reached with delay,
which vanishes as agents become almost surely privately informed of the true state.
Research In Progress
Bargaining and Aspiration
Bargaining with Private Information Leakage
Two sided Incomplete Information Bargaining with Interdependent Reservation Values
Mediation in Bargaining : Efficiency vs. Fairness