Education

Postdoctoral Fellow (2019 – current)
Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University

Visiting Scholar (2017 – 2018)
Operations, Information, and Decisions Department
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

PhD in Behavioral Decision Research (2012 – 2018)
Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University

About

My research draws on experimental tools from psychology and economics to study how people engage with information and how this affects the decisions they make. Across published papers and ongoing projects, my work documents a widespread desire to actively avoid information, even when this can have costly consequences and lead to worse decisions.

I am currently on the job market for tenure-track faculty positions in management departments. I am particularly interested in positions in North America and Asia.

My job market paper (The Agent-Selection Problem in Distributive Bargaining) shows how a bias towards favorable information can lead parties in a dispute to select excessively optimistic representatives to negotiate on their behalf. The agents who ultimately meet at the bargaining table are not only more polarized in their views about what a fair outcome of the negotiation would be than agents overall, but also more polarized than the principals whom they represent. As a result, negotiations are more likely to end in costly impasse, making both parties worse off then if they hired an agent at random or selected a less optimistic agent instead.