American Economic Review, 2024, 114(11): 3746–3787.
We study how misperceptions of others’ tastes influence beliefs, demand, and prices in a market with observational learning.

Games and Economic Behavior, 2024, 148: 449–486.
We examine whether people account for socially desirable responding (SDR) when drawing inferences from poll data.

Management Science, 2024, 70(12): 8735–8752.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Revise and Resubmit at American Economic Journal: Microeconomics.
We experimentally examine how people learn from others’ actions when those people may have differing tastes.

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.

This paper studies the implications of taste projection—the tendency to overestimate how similar others’ preferences are to our own—within social-learning environments. Note: Several ideas in this paper have been subsumed by `Quality is in the Eye of the Beholder: Taste Projection in Markets with Social Learning’ (AER, 2024). A new version is in progress that emphasizes how even small degrees of bias can lead to learning failures.

In Progress. We study the relationship between trade and private information in models with heterogeneous priors, and we establish a series of results showing that trade flows in the direction of disagreements and not the direction of private information.

In Progress. We experimentally study how people revise their perceived causal models in settings where they interact with others. We consider a setting where individuals first form mental models in isolation based on observational data. We then examine when and how exposure to others’ predictions—cast by people who may have extracted differing mental models—influences the model-updating process.

In Progress. In an experiment, we examine the degree to which people use the dominant strategy in an English auction with independent private values. We consider minor changes to the standard auction format where competing measures of complexity disagree on the simplicity of the resulting mechanisms, allowing us to test the extent to which these measures align with observed behavior.

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.

In Progress. We analyze how taste projection affects bilateral trade under asymmetric information.

In Progress. Using a simple experiment, we explore whether projection bias leads to errors in inferences about others’ overall productivity and personality characteristics.