My research agenda comprises three strands. The first examines the determinants of gender gaps in leadership, spanning organisational characteristics and the design of leadership selection institutions. The second evaluates interventions to disrupt online marketplaces for illicit goods, focusing on strategies that target goods delivery and public reputation systems. The third examines belief formation and learning, investigating how individuals form, update, and distort beliefs.
Willingness to Lead in Precarious Times: Supply-Side Evidence on the Glass Cliff (with Nisvan Erkal, Lata Gangadharan and Erte Xiao) [Draft Coming Soon]
Women often take leadership positions with a high risk of failure, a phenomenon known as the Glass Cliff. While existing literature has focused on demand-side motivations for nominating women for precarious positions, limited attention has been paid to the supply-side and workers' willingness to apply for such positions. In this study, we investigate gender differences in the willingness to lead financially successful versus financially struggling organisations under two different leadership selection institutions. Under the Opt-in institution, candidates must actively express interest in the leadership position. Under the Opt-out institution, all candidates are automatically considered for the leadership position unless they actively choose to decline. We find that under the Opt-in institution, men are less likely to apply for leadership in struggling versus successful organisations, driven by shifting empirical norms and a residual preference for "winner-seeking." In contrast, women's willingness to lead is not affected by financial status. As a result, a gender gap emerges in leadership for successful organisations but not for struggling organisations. This gap disappears under the Opt-out institution, suggesting that institutional design offers a policy tool for promoting gender-balanced applicant pools.
Recall Distortion and Past Choices (with Vivek Roy-Chowdhury) [Paper Link]
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) [Paper Link]
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.
How Disruption Leads to Displacement (with Edoardo Gallo, Jonathan Lusthaus and Federico Varese) [Draft in Development]
Leadership, Gender and Physiological Arousal (with Nisvan Erkal, Lata Gangadharan, Lee Lawrence, Kristian Rotaru, Erte Xiao and Songfa Zhong) [Data Collected]
Imitation and Adaptation: How Social Context Shapes Individual Learning (with Caroline Liqui-Lung) [Design in Development]
Performance and Mentoring (with Nisvan Erkal, Lata Gangadharan and Erte Xiao) [Design in Development]