experimental economics

The Power of Incentives

I study an optimal design of monetary incentives in experiments where incentives are a treatment variable. I introduce the Budget Minimization problem in which a researcher chooses the level of incentives that allows her to detect a predicted …

Experiments on the Fly

How do exogenous increases in resources to a government affect its expenditure decisions? Economic theory typically predicts that a lump-sum grant will have the same impact on government expenditures as an increase in income. However, empirical …

Give Me a Challenge or Give Me a Raise

I study the effect of task difficulty on workers’ effort. I find that task difficulty has an inverse-U effect on effort and that this effect is quantitatively large, especially when compared to the effect of conditional monetary rewards. Difficulty …

The Economics of Babysitting a Robot

I study the welfare effect of automation on workers in a setting where technology is complementary but imperfect. Using a modified task-based framework, I argue that imperfect complementary automation can impose non-pecuniary costs on workers via a …

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 …