Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch

Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch

Assistant Professor of Economics

University of Iowa

I am an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at the University of Iowa, Tippie College of Business. My primary fields are microeconomic theory, behavioral economics, and experimental economics.

Interests

  • Microeconomic Theory
  • Behavioral Economics
  • Experimental Economics

Education

  • PhD in Economics

    UC Berkeley

  • BA in Economics and Mathematics

    UC Berkeley

Publications

Quality is in the Eye of the Beholder: Taste Projection in Markets with Observational Learning

American Economic Review, Forthcoming.
We study how misperceptions of others’ tastes influence beliefs, demand, and prices in a market with observational learning.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Antonio Rosato
PDF Online Appendix

Inference from Biased Polls

Games and Economic Behavior, Forthcoming.
We examine whether people account for socially desirable responding (SDR) when drawing inferences from poll data.
Andy Brownback, Nathaniel Burke, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch
PDF

Failures in Forecasting: An Experiment on Interpersonal Projection Bias

Management Science, Forthcoming.
Using a real-effort experiment, we show that people project their current tastes onto others, even when others’ tastes are exogenously manipulated and transparently different.
Benjamin Bushong, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch
PDF Online Appendix

Reference Dependence and Attribution Bias: Evidence from Real-Effort Experiments

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2023, 15(2): 271-308.
We demonstrate that people’s impressions of a real-effort task are shaped by the elation or disappointment they felt when first working on the task.
Benjamin Bushong, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch
PDF Online Appendix

Learning with Misattribution of Reference Dependence

Journal of Economic Theory, 2022, 203, 105473.
We examine errors in learning that arise when an agent who suffers attribution bias fails to account for her reference-dependent utility.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Benjamin Bushong
PDF Working Version

Projection of Private Values in Auctions

American Economic Review, 2021, 111(10): 3256-3298.
We explore how taste projection—the tendency to overestimate how similar others’ tastes are to one’s own—affects bidding in auctions.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Marco Pagnozzi, Antonio Rosato
PDF Online Appendix

Working Papers

Channeled Attention and Stable Errors

Revise and Resubmit at Quarterly Journal of Economics.
We develop a framework for assessing when somebody will eventually notice that she has a misspecified model of the world, premised on the idea that she neglects information that she deems—through the lens of her misconceptions—to be irrelevant.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin, Joshua Schwartzstein
PDF Previous Version

Heterogeneous Tastes and Social (Mis)Learning

We experimentally examine how people learn from others’ actions when those people may have differing tastes.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Benjamin Bushong
PDF Online Appendix

Naive Social Learning, Mislearning, and Unlearning

We study social learning in several natural, yet under-explored, environments among people who naively think each predecessor’s action reflects solely that person’s private information.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin
PDF

Taste Projection in Models of Social Learning

This paper studies the implications of taste projection—the tendency to overestimate how similar others’ preferences are to our own—within social-learning environments.
PDF

Disagreement, Information, and Trade

In Progress. We study the relationship between trade and private information in models with non-common priors, and we establish a series of results showing that trade flows in the direction of disagreements and not private information.
Erik Eyster, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin

Errors in Information Acquisition

In Progress. We experimentally study how people acquire information in a sequential search problem and examine the degree to which their demand for information deviates from the rational benchmark.
Benjamin Bushong, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch

Taste Projection in Bilateral Trade

In Progress. We analyze how taste projection affects bilateral trade under asymmetric information.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Marco Pagnozzi, Antonio Rosato

The Person or the Situation? Projection Bias and Inference about Others

In Progress. Using a simple experiment, we explore whether projection bias leads to errors in inferences about others’ overall productivity and personality characteristics.
Benjamin Bushong, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Jeongbin Kim

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