behavioral economics

Preference for Automation

I study workers' preference for automation in a setting where automation complements workers' skills but is imperfect. While such technology increases workers' productivity and wages by enabling work on a new task, it subjects workers to a …

Give Me a Challenge or Give Me a Raise

I study the effect of task difficulty on workers' effort and compare it to the effect of monetary rewards in an incentivized lab experiment. I find that task difficulty has an inverse-U effect on effort, and that this effect is quantitatively large …

Deciphering the Noise: The Welfare Costs of Noisy Behavior

Theoretical work on stochastic choice mainly focuses on the sources of choice randomness, and less on its economic consequences. We attempt to close this gap by developing a method of extracting information about the monetary costs of noise from …

Selection in the Lab: A Network Approach

We study the dynamics of the selection problem in economic experiments. We show that adding dynamics significantly complicates the effect of the selection problem on external validity and can explain some contradictory results in the literature. We …

Using Response Times to Measure Ability on a Cognitive Task

I show how using response times as a proxy for effort can address a long-standing issue of how to separate the effect of cognitive ability on performance from the effect of motivation. My method is based on a dynamic stochastic model of optimal …

Cognitive Ability and Risk Preferences: A Reconsideration

I plan to revisit the previous results on the relationship between ability and risk preferences. The existing literature suggests that higher cognitive ability is associated with lower risk aversion, however, the mechanism behind this effect remains …

Do Recommendation Systems Improve Welfare?

Recommendation systems have become ubiquitous in modern lives. We encounter them when shopping online, streaming movies, or listening to music. Despite the widespread use of these systems, their effect on consumers' welfare remains ambiguous. Do …

Gambling According to GARP

The goal of this project is to develop a new risk-elicitation task. The new task is a variation on the allocation task used in the literature. We argue that our alternative has some desirable properties and allows for a very transparent way to test …

The Role of Motivation in Intelligence Testing

I aim to explore what is the effect of motivation on test scores and how that effect compares to the effect of cognitive ability. The literature on human capital development has long suggested that motivation plays a vital role in success in …

Experimental Methods: When and Why Contextual Instructions Are Important

An important methodological issue in experimental research is the extent to which one should use context-rich or abstract language in the instructions for an experiment. The traditional use of abstract context in experimental economics is commonly …