One strand of my research examines organisational behaviour, focusing on gender gaps in leadership and the role of institutional design in reducing these gaps. A second strand studies belief formation and learning, focusing on how psychological and social mechanisms affect these processes. I also study the design and evaluation of police interventions in illicit markets.
Recall Distortion and Past Choices (with Vivek Roy-Chowdhury)
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 240, December 2025
We explore whether beliefs are distorted to enable optimism about the consequences of past choices. In our experiment, involving over 1000 subjects, individuals are asked to recall a signal. In the treatment group alone, the signal is positively correlated with a favourable unobserved outcome of a prior choice. Our results show that subjects in the treatment group believe the signal was higher, even immediately after transmission. We also obtain some evidence that belief distortions increase after a few days due to memory loss. Finally, subjects distort beliefs in precisely the same way even when they know they will find out the true value at the end of the experiment, implying that the ability to sustain belief distortions indefinitely does not influence the present motive to distort beliefs.
How to Disrupt a Market (with Edoardo Gallo, Jonathan Lusthaus and Federico Varese)
Under review at the Economic Journal
Awarded the Prize for Outstanding Poster Presentation, Annual Conference of the Network of Behavioural and Experimental Economists Based in the UK (2026)
Market design research in economics naturally focusses on how to improve market efficiency. Our objective here is exactly the opposite - how to design interventions that make a market less efficient. Our research is inspired by the growth of illicit markets online where reducing their efficiency may reduce societal harm. Using a web-based experiment, we find that a partial disruption to delivery is an effective method to decrease market efficiency. The decrease is borne by sellers who sell fewer goods and have lower earnings. A consequence of a disruption to delivery, however, is an increase in market concentration because it facilitates the emergence of a dominant seller. In contrast, we find that attacks on seller ratings are ineffective at reducing market efficiency. This study paves the way for evidence-based, causally driven investigations to aid policies to disrupt cybercrime and other illicit markets.
Delivery disruptions present a persistent challenge for online marketplaces, where speed and reliability are key competitive advantages. While such disruptions typically reduce social welfare in conventional markets, they may have the opposite effect in illicit ones by reducing harmful consumption or redirecting trade toward regulated platforms. We investigate how a partial disruption to delivery affects market functioning in a two-platform setting where users can migrate to evade the disruption's direct effects. Using an online experiment, we find that the disruption causes persistent displacement, reducing participation on the targeted platform by over 20 percentage points. These findings suggest that targeted delivery disruptions can serve as an effective policy lever in illicit markets, shifting users toward platforms where they are easier to identify or that are under government control.
Willingness to Lead in Precarious Times: Supply-Side Evidence on the Glass Cliff (with Nisvan Erkal, Lata Gangadharan and Erte Xiao)
Stress and Leadership (with Nisvan Erkal, Lata Gangadharan, Lee Lawrence, Kristian Rotaru, Erte Xiao and Songfa Zhong)
Imitation and Adaptation (with Caroline Liqui-Lung)