I am Marco Reuter, a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Mannheim, a researcher in market design at the ZEW Mannheim and at the Collaborative Research Center of the Universities of Bonn and Mannheim.
My research interests are market and mechanism design. Recently, I have been focussing on the economics of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
In my job market paper, I examine the incentives for an entrepreneur to decentralize her business using the blockchain.
You can read more about the paper in a short article I have written for a16z, watch a video of me presenting the paper or check out the abstract below.
Abstract
Although blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity over the past years, there does not seem to be a consensus if they bring any value to economic interactions. In this paper, I argue that a fundamental value the blockchain provides is commitment. I develop a model of an entrepreneur, who can create a network for her users. She can decide to retain control of the network with centralized implementation through a regular company, or surrender control over the network with a decentralized implementation through the blockchain. Users that join the network are subject to a locked-in effect. I show that a decentralized implementation of the network is (i) preferred by the entrepreneur and (ii) a Pareto improvement, if and only if the size of the locked-in effect is sufficiently large.