Information economics, applied decision theory

Since September 2020, Sarah Auster has been Professor of Microeconomics at the University of Bonn. Previously, she served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Mannheim and the Department of Decision Sciences at Bocconi University. She earned her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence in 2014. Her research focuses on microeconomic theory – especially information economics, contract and mechanism design, and applications of decision theory. She is particularly interested in how agents make economic decisions when they have an imperfect understanding of the stochastic environment in which they operate.

Published papers

• Sorting versus Screening in Decentralized Markets with Adverse Selection

  Auster, S., & Gottardi, P. (2024). Sorting versus Screening in Decentralized Markets with Adverse Selection. Journal of Economic Theory, 105883.

• Optimal Pricing, Private Information and Search for an Outside Offer

  Auster, S., Kos, N., & Piccolo, S. (2022) Optimal Pricing, Private Information and Search for an Outside Offer. The RAND Journal of Economics.

Discussion papers

• Timing Decisions under Model Uncertainty

• Prolonged Learning and Hasty Stopping: the Wald Problem with Ambiguity

• Sorting versus Screening in Decentralized Markets with Adverse Selection

• Simultaneous Search and Adverse Selection

• Optimal Pricing, Private Information and Search for an Outside Offer

• Optimal Delegation and Information Transmission under Limited Awareness

• Sequential Trading with Coarse Contingencies

• Limited Awareness and Financial Intermediation