From 2015 to 2021, I was Chair of the ESOMAS Department (which is short for the unseemly Dipartimento di Scienze Economico-Sociali e Matematico-Statistiche) at the University of Torino.
I am very happy to report that in 2018 our department was awarded a major Dipartimenti di Eccellenza Grant from the Italian Ministry of University and Research, for the period 2018-2022. ESOMAS was one of 180 departments in state universities across all disciplines to be funded, and in particular it ranked 3rd in the final ranking of the 18 departments of Economics and Statistics funded nationwide.
Since October 2021, I have taken the role of the Dean of Faculty at the Collegio Carlo Alberto.
From January 2012 to December 2021, I was Editor of Decisions in Economics and Finance (DEF), a journal published by Springer-Verlag, which is the official organ of AMASES, the Italian association of Mathematical Economists. I am now a member of its editorial board.
The journal's objective, besides obtaining an Impact Factor from the ISI, is to establish itslef as a natural outlet for high-quality research applying interesting and novel analytical tools to Economics and Finance. Please do consider DEF as possible outlet for your work!
If you want up-to-date bibliometric measures on the impact of my research here is a link to my Web of Science page, and here is a a link to my Scopus page.
NEWS: I am happy to report that one of my papers was included in the special virtual issue of the Journal of Economic Theory containing a selection of 50 influential articles from the journal's first 50 years (what's more: the whole issue is open access).
My cv page contains links to download most of my published and forthcoming papers. The following are links to and short descriptions of my more recent completed papers:
NEWLY REVISED! Randomizing without Randomness (680 KB, October 2019 --- Revised May 2022, with Daniele Pennesi; open access journal version published on Economic Theory).
We provide a methodology for eliciting utility midpoints from preferences, assuming that payoffs are consumption plans and that preferences satisfy a minimal form of additive separability. The methodology does not require any subjective or objective uncertainty. Thus, this construction of utility midpoints allows us to define mixtures of acts in a purely subjective fashion, without making any assumptions as to the decision maker's reaction to the uncertainty that may be present. This approach makes it possible to provide a simple and fully subjective characterization of the secondorder subjective expected utility model, allowing a clear distinction of such model from subjective expected utility.
A General Theory of Subjective Mixtures (382 KB, December 2018 -- Revised March 2020, with Daniele Pennesi; last working paper version of the paper published on the Journal of Economic Theory). (This version also contains the Supplementary Appendices.)
We provide, and characterize behaviorally, a framework for constructing subjective mixtures which requires neither the Certainty Independence nor the Monotonicity axiom, replacing them with much weaker "local" properties. As we also show by means of examples, this framework provides a purely subjective foundation to most of the recent preference models which employ the Anscombe-Aumann setting. It also allows a subjective formulation of a preference for ambiguity hedging, and as a consequence allows the distinction of the notions of ambiguity aversion and preference for randomization.
Risk Sharing in the Small and in the Large (500 KB, December 2014 -- Revised March 2018, with Marciano Siniscalchi; last working paper version of the paper published on the Journal of Economic Theory). (This version also contains the Online Appendix.).
This paper analyzes risk sharing in economies with no aggregate uncertainty when agents have non-convex preferences. In particular, agents need not be globally risk-averse, or uncertainty-averse in the sense of Schmeidler (1989). We identify a behavioral condition under which betting is inefficient (i.e., every Pareto-efficient allocation provides full insurance, and conversely) if and only if agents' supporting probabilities (defined as in Rigotti, Shannon, and Strzalecki, 2008) have a non-empty intersection. Our condition is consistent with empirical and experimental evidence documenting violations of convexity in either outcomes or utilities. Our results show that the connection between speculative betting and inconsistent beliefs does not depend upon global notions of risk or ambiguity aversion.
Flexible Contracts (380 KB, April 2010 -- Revised December 2015, with Piero Gottardi and Jean-Marc Tallon; last working paper version of the paper published on Games and Economic Behavior).
This paper studies the costs and beneļ¬ts of delegating decisions to superiorly informed agents, that is of adopting flexible contracts, relative to the use of rigid, non discretionary contracts. The main focus of the paper lies in the analysis of the costs of delegation, primarily agency costs, versus their benefits, primarily the flexibility of the action choice in two different environments, one with risk and one with ambiguity. We first determine and characterize the properties of the optimal flexible contract. We then show that the higher the agent's degree of risk aversion, the higher is the agency costs of delegation and the less profitable a flexible contract relative to a rigid one. When the parties have imprecise probabilistic beliefs, the agent's degree of imprecision aversion introduces another agency cost, which again reduces the relative profitability of flexible contracts.
Some older stuff available for download:
A More Robust Definition of Multiple Priors (480 KB, April 2010, with Marciano Siniscalchi).
Like "Ambiguity in the Small and in the Large," this paper provides a multiple-priors representation of unambiguous preference, but for any preference that is monotonic, Bernoullian and suitably continuous. Again, we do not require either Certainty Independence or Uncertainty Aversion. Focusing on the "global" case, we characterize the set of priors in terms of Clarke-Rockafellar (rather than Clarke) differentials. This allows us to provide an explicit calculation of the set of priors for several recent decision models: multiplier preferences, the smooth ambiguity model, the vector expected utility model, as well as confidence function, variational, general "uncertainty-averse" preferences, and mean-dispersion preferences.
Being (the final pre-publication version of) an entry on the topic of "Ambiguity" written for the Encyclopaedia of Quantitative Finance edited by Rama Cont, John Wiley and Sons, 2010.
I study the effects on a simple agency problem of assuming that parties display beliefs which are not necessarily represented by additive measures, as will be the case if they are uncertainty averse or if there are unforeseen contingencies. I present the players' problems, prove existence of solutions, and discuss analogies and differences with the standard case in the characteristics of optimal incentive schemes. It is shown that quality of information, which cannot be captured in the additive case, can be extremely important for both parties' choices. In fact, I discuss improvements in the quality of information, and prove that they are going to be beneficial to the principal in a number of cases. This is not in general true for (the natural generalization of) changes in Blackwell informativeness.