Publications

Marketmaking Middlemen (2023)

Pieter Gautier, Bo Hu and Makoto Watanabe
The RAND Journal of Economics, 54: 83-103.

This paper develops a model in which market structure is determined endogenously by the choice of intermediation mode. We show that a marketmaking middleman, who adopts the mixture of inventory-holding and platform-making modes, can emerge in a directed search equilibrium.

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A Job Ladder Model of Executive Compensation (2025)

Bo Hu
Review of Economic Dynamics, 55: 101257.

Assess the impact of managerial labor market competition on executive incentive contracts using a dynamic contracting model with moral hazard, search frictions, and poaching.

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Working Papers

Middlemen, Liquidity Support, and Product Market Distortions

with Makoto Watanabe and Jun Zhang, 2026.

Investigate how middlemen's provision of liquidity support to suppliers affects downstream market distortions.

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From Cash to Buy-Now-Pay-Later: Impacts of platform-provided credit on market efficiency

with Han Han and Makoto Watanabe, 2024.

Analyze the market efficiency implications when e-commerce platforms act as both transaction intermediaries and credit providers via Buy-Now-Pay-Later services.

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Self-Preferencing and Welfare in Hybrid Platforms

with Hongzhe Huang, Zonglai Kou, and Makoto Watanabe, 2025.

Examine the welfare consequences of self-preferencing behavior by hybrid platforms that simultaneously operate a marketplace and compete as a first-party seller.

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Selected Presentations

Marketmaking Middlemen

Symposium in Honor of Jean Tirole (2014), Search and Matching Workshop Bristol (2015), EARIE (2015), EEA-ESEM (2016).

Managerial Labor Market Competition

Search and Matching Annual Conference (2018), Belgian Financial Research Forum (2018), Queen Mary PhD Workshop (2018), 26th Finance Forum (2018).