Information economics, mechanism design, applied decision theory

Since September 2020, Sarah Auster is an Associate Professor for Microeconomics at the University of Bonn. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Mannheim. In 2014, she completed her doctorate at the European University Institute in Florence. Sarah’s research focus is on microeconomic theory, in particular contract/mechanism design and applications of decision theory. She is interested in economic decisions by agents who have limited awareness of the relevant contingencies or limited knowledge of the likelihood of possible events. She also works on competitive markets with asymmetric information and search frictions.

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