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.

My job market paper (The Agent-Selection Dilemma in Distributive Bargaining) shows how a bias towards favorable information can lead parties in a dispute to select overly aggressive representatives to negotiate on their behalf. The agents who get selected and ultimately meet at the bargaining table end up holding more polarized beliefs about what a fair outcome of the negotiation would be than agents overall. Indeed, they are more polarized in those views than even 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 instead selected a less aggressive agent.