December 9th, the European Research Council (ERC) officially published the list of projects it retained for its 2020 “Consolidator Grants” Call. Only 13% of submitted proposals were successful for this year’s round.

As a reminder, ERC Consolidator Grants are destined to help mi-career researchers consolidate their own teams and carry out innovative projects across all scientific disciplines.

The project “Information and Misinformation Economics: Design, Manipulations and Countermeasures” (IMEDMC) submitted by permanent faculty member Eduardo PEREZ, is one of 10 projects selected in the field of economics at the European level.

It is the 5th time in a little over a year that that one of the Department’s faculty members has been awarded ERC funding.

It is worth noting that the awarding of an ERC grant to both Edurado PEREZ and Jeanne HAGENBACH this year attests to the strength and excellence of the Department’s recent expansion in the fields of game theory and information economics. To wit, Eduardo PEREZ and Jeanne HAGENBACH co-authored two important articles published in Econometrica in 2014 and in Games and Economic Behavior in 2018 featuring theoretical work on information disclosure and an experiment they designed to investigate how agents disclose and interpret evidence depending on the strategic context, which were stepping stones for their respective ERC projects IMEDMC and MOREV.

Eduardo PEREZ joined the Department in 2016 as an Associate Professor of Economics. Prior to joining us he taught for 7 years at the École Polytechnique. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Among his editorial activities, he is Associate Editor of the American Economic Review and Member of the Editorial Board of the Review of Economic Studies.

Awarded the 'Young Researcher in Economics Prize' by the Fondation Banque de France, a few short years after obtaining his PhD at Stanford, Eduardo PEREZ’s research interests include information economics, political economy, game theory and social networks. His current interests include recent work focused on the design of information environments, the transmission of verifiable information and the modelling of solidarity networks and their interaction with redistributive public policies. 

Eduardo PEREZ’s project IMEDMC follows his ANR project “Strategic Communication: Theoretical and Experimental Investigations” (StratCom), in which he sought to increase understanding of strategic communication and information design, both from a theoretical and an experimental perspective, with a focus on hard information. He studied a series of communication games between a transmitter and a receiver by varying the incentives of the issuer to analyze the determinants of behavior of both types of actors.

With IMEDC, Eduardo PEREZ takes his research in a new direction: “As recognized by a large literature in economics, information plays a crucial role in shaping the outcome of downstream decisions by strategic players (i.e. at the receiving end of informative signals). However, the structure of information also impacts decisions by strategic agents upstream of the generation of signals, as agents mould the underlying reality differently depending on how other players will eventually be informed about it. Finally, designed information production systems are susceptible to manipulations by third party agents pursuing their own interests.”

The project’s objective is to better understand “how socially or privately optimal information designs shape upstream and downstream decisions, how they can be manipulated by private interests, and how to best anticipate and counter such manipulations.” His work can be applied to further our understanding of important practical questions such as how to design better testing when cheating is possible, as in the recent diesel emissions scandal, or what policies are most effective against fake news.

Read more about the IMEDC Project
Consult the ERC’s press release

More about Eduardo PEREZ and his research