Areas of research and statements

Mechanism Design

We follow an objectives-first approach to designing economic systems and incentives, taking into account players' private information while allowing them to take part in the computation of the solution, with their privacy guaranteed by encryption schemes.

Contract Theory

How do uncertainty, commitment issues and secrecy cause asymmetric information ? How can automated enforcements and hard-coded commitments improve contracts, from borrowing/lending to insurance (with newly introduced flexible states in between)

Financial systems can be viewed as systems allowing the trade of contracts. However, contracts are not-single dimensional (e.g., more or less money);  the more contingencies financial systems can deal with, the more efficient and resilient they become.

Encryption is the science of protecting messages' content and authenticity, while securing senders and receivers' identities and privacy. Technological implementations of encryption enables a large toolbox for economic design, with a wider range of public-privacy states of information.

By examining separately each component of distributed ledger technologies – ledgers as financial accounts, e-value transfer and digital currency, encryption, consensus algorithm, economics incentives – we provide a framework to analyze (and use in regulation) different implementations and goals of this new family of technology.

We compare and study different motivations, design possibilities, and impact on the financial sector for Central Bank Digital Currencies

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Read more about our latest collaboration with GIZ and Maiden Labs here.