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I am interested in Economic Theory, especially in information economics (the analysis of the strategic decisions of agents to acquire, share, and use information) and in how information asymmetries affect incentives.

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João Ramos

Assistant Professor of Finance and Business Economics
Office: HOH 205,
3670 Trousdale Pkwy,
Los Angeles, CA 90089,
United States
Email: joao.ramos@usc.edu

RESEARCH
RESEARCH

Published and Forthcoming

Working Papers

We consider a team-production environment where all participants are motivated by career concerns, and where a team's joint productive outcome may have different reputational implications for different team members. In this context, we characterize equilibrium disclosure of team-outcomes when team-disclosure choices aggregate individual decisions through some deliberation protocol. In contrast with individual disclosure problems, we show that equilibria often involve partial disclosure. Furthermore, we study the effort-incentive properties of equilibrium disclosure strategies implied by different deliberation protocols; and show that the partial disclosure of team outcomes may improve individuals' incentives to contribute to the team. Finally, we study the design of deliberation protocols and characterize productive environments where effort incentives are maximized by unilateral decision protocols or more consensual deliberation procedures.

We study a continuous-time model of partnership, with persistence and imperfect state monitoring. Partners exert private efforts to shape the stock of fundamentals, which drives the pro ts of the partnership, and the profits are the only signal they observe. The near-optimal strongly symmetric equilibria are non-Markovian and are characterized by a novel differential equation that describes the supremum of equilibrium incentives for any level of relational capital. Imperfect monitoring of the fundamentals helps sustain incentives, due to deferred incentives, and increases the partnership's value (Sand in the wheels). Good profit outcomes rally the partners to further increase effort when relational capital is low, but lead them to coast and decrease effort when relational capital is high. Even partnerships with high fundamentals may unravel after a short spell of terrible signals (Beatles' break-up).

TEACHING
SKILLS

French - Mother Tongue

Teaching at USC Marshall

Microeconomics for Business

Topics in Microeconomic Theory II (PhD level)

Teaching at Queen Mary university of London

Strategy, Leadership and Management of Investment Banks

Microeconomic Theory II (PhD level)

Fall 2016, 2022, 2023

Spring 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Spring 2021, 2022

Spring 2022

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