I am a PhD student in economics at Aalto University. I started my PhD studies in 2021, spent academic year 2023–24 at MIT Department of Economics, and plan to complete the PhD program in 2026.
My field of research is microeconomics. I employ game theory and mechanism design to examine how incomplete information influences market behavior and optimal government policy. Most of my research is theoretical, but the applications include pressing 21st-century issues, ranging from environmental crises and the rise of inequality to the regulation of the technology industry. When appropriate, I supplement the theoretical insights with empirical evidence.
I am grateful to Aalto University, Emil Aaltonen Foundation, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Fulbright Finland Foundation, HSE Support Foundation, KAUTE Foundation, and OP Group Research Foundation for funding my research work.
Microeconomics is fun, but I also like to wander through the streets of Helsinki on a sunlit summer night—marveling at the Art Nouveau façades, watching the waves of the Baltic Sea and listening to a Sibelius symphony.
Major climate policies implement externality payments that vary across income groups. We develop a mechanism design approach for externalities and redistribution to study such policies. Our mechanism balances among broad distributional objectives, incentives to work, and efforts to reduce the externality. The welfare-optimal allocation can be implemented through income taxation and income-dependent externality payments, which can be progressive or regressive depending on empirically testable parameters. Using Finnish administrative data, we find that optimal policies are progressive for vehicle use but regressive for electricity consumption.
We consider the revenue-maximizing design and pricing of certification contracts. A certifier offers a menu of tests to an information sender, who holds partial private information about an unknown state and seeks to persuade an information receiver to take a favorable action. The selling mechanism gives information to the receiver through two channels: the actual informativeness of the tests and the sender's choice among the options in the menu. We show that the revenue-maximizing menu consists of a single test, as the second channel reduces the gains from market segmentation. The receiver obtains zero surplus, while the sender may receive information rents. In contrast, if the certifier can conceal which test the sender selects, the optimal menu may include multiple tests.
We consider a market in which sellers privately choose vertical product qualities, consumers then receive information about the chosen qualities according to a predetermined information structure, and the sellers then compete à la Bertrand given consumers' posterior beliefs. We characterize the set of possible market outcomes for different information structures. With a monopoly seller, the seller-optimal information structure fully reveals the quality and incentivizes welfare-maximizing quality production. Under competition, the seller-optimal symmetric information structure is coarse and incentivizes randomization in quality choice, leading to vertical differentiation in terms of consumers' posterior beliefs.
We examine how the possibility of buyouts affects start-ups' incentives to innovate, enter markets and compete when there is asymmetric information about start-ups' prospects. Informational frictions may encourage a start-up to adopt a "fake-it-till-you-exit strategy" where it innovates little, enters the market without actual competitive advantage and captures the market by selling at a low price to signal it is valuable. Banning acquisitions may stimulate start-ups' innovation but decrease pre-buyout-stage competition.
