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.

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.

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

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 their 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 notice that they have a misspecified model of the world, premised on the idea that they may not pay attention to information that their model deems irrelevant.

Revise and Resubmit at American Economic Journal: Microeconomics.
We experimentally examine how people learn from others’ actions when the people they observe 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 environments 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. We find that peer information does surprisingly little: returning to the original data proves far more effective.

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 find systematic departures from optimal stopping that stem from a failure to think ahead about what further evidence could tell them.

In Progress. Individuals often draw inferences from how much information others choose to acquire, yet they may ignore the strategic nature of dynamic information collection. We document a bias whereby people treat endogenously acquired information as if it were exogenously given—and so read a long search as a sign of good information when it more likely signals the opposite.

In Progress. We analyze how taste projection affects bilateral trade under asymmetric information, showing that projection can actually improve efficiency, though not always.

In Progress. We develop a framework based on costly perspective taking that reconciles why people perceive others as similar to themselves in some contexts, yet as different in others. We experimentally test its predictions.

In Progress. We experimentally explore whether a paternalist’s own current circumstances influence how they restrict others’ choices, and whether paternalists account for the transparently different situations of others when imposing restrictions on them.