Risk Preferences and Incentives for Acquisition and Disclosure (with Erik Lillethun), The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, 2020, 36(2): 314-342. Online Appendix
Civil disputes feature parties with biased incentives acquiring evidence with costly effort. Evidence may then be revealed at trial or concealed to persuade a judge or jury. Using a persuasion game, we examine how a litigant’s risk preferences influence evidence acquisition incentives. We find that high risk aversion depresses equilibrium evidence acquisition. We then study the problem of designing legal rules to balance good decision making against the costs of acquisition. We characterize the optimal design, which differs from equilibrium decision rules. Notably, for very risk-averse litigants, the design is “overincentivized” with stronger rewards and punishments than in equilibrium. We find similar results for various common legal rules, including admissibility of evidence, maximum penalties, and minimum penalties. These results have implications for how rules could differentiate between high risk aversion types (e.g., individuals) and low risk aversion types (e.g., corporations) to improve evidence acquisition efficiency.Long-Run Choice Anomalies in Reinforcement Learning with Bounded Memory (with Erik Lillethun), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2025, 231: 106901.
Violations of expected utility (EU) maximization have been demonstrated in many settings; however, anomalies are often reduced after repeated choices. We examine if sufficient experiential learning allows convergence to EU-maximization. In the model, a decision maker with long but finite memory repeatedly makes choices in the same decision problem with uncertainty. We focus on the existence and severity of a certain unambiguous type of long-run choice anomaly: ranking reversals (a non-EU maximizing action being most frequently chosen in the long run). We show reversals exist for almost all preferences, even in realistic examples. Reversals tend to happen when payoff differences are heavily skewed. Longer memory does not eliminate the possibility of ranking reversals, but it does make reversals less severe. Our key takeaway is that finite memory can produce major violations of the expected utility ranking even in a model where both memory and the decision-making process are unbiased.Memory Constraints in Adoption of Productive Technologies (with Haseeb Ahmed and Shanthi Manian), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2025, 236: 107118.
Limited adoption of productive technologies is often identified as a key reason for lagging agricultural productivity in developing countries. We hypothesize that memory limitations play a crucial role in explaining these sub-optimal levels of technology adoption. We test this hypothesis in the context of cattle disease prevention and management among smallholder farmers in east Africa. If farmers under-remember cattle health events, this will reduce their incentive to invest in preventive technologies. We implemented a field experiment in Western Kenya to study if relieving memory constraints increases demand for a livestock disease prevention technology. We trained and incentivized study participants to keep simple written records of cattle disease events, health expenditures, and milk production outcomes for a period of three months. We find this intervention nearly doubled demand for the preventive technology, and evidence suggests that the record-keeping increased recall of disease events. This paper provides evidence that memory may serve as a barrier to technology adoption and our record-keeping intervention can serve as a low-cost way of increasing take-up of productive technologies.Ill-Informed Beliefs: Misperceptions of the costs of unplanned parental absences (with Jessica Hoel and Prachi Jain), Southern Economic Journal, forthcoming.
While most couples say they want to divide childcare responsibilities evenly, different-sex couples tend to allocate childcare unevenly in practice. To explain this inconsistency, we focus on worker beliefs: parents anticipate (correctly or incorrectly) that employers penalize men and women differently for absences from work. We conduct an online hiring experiment with workers and employers. We elicit workers’ beliefs about employer penalties and examine whether these beliefs align with employers’ wage offers. Workers expect employers to penalize workers more harshly than employers do. Workers expect penalties are worse for men than women, but employers penalize women more than men.Endogenous Identity Formation and Gender Differences
Gender differences in economic decisions are well-documented and span a variety of important choices. Laboratory experiments have been used to identify potential mechanisms to explain these differences, and the results have most frequently been attributed to men and women having different preferences, especially when subjects' choices are anonymous. In this paper, I propose a theoretical model that highlights that persistent gender differences can arise without differences in preferences. I show that if two groups are identical ex ante but there exists a stereotype about one of the groups, then groups will behave in ways consistent with this stereotype in equilibrium. Extending this to a multi-period model, I show that if individuals endogenously form group identities through habit formation, these differences will persist in the long-run, even after choices are no longer observed. The model thus depicts a mechanism through which external constraints are eventually internalized and captures how social norms can become self-enforced by individuals. Using multiple existing experimental datasets where gender data were collected but never analyzed, I find evidence consistent with my model's predictions. I then conduct a new experiment to directly test the proposed mechanism. I show that by exposing subjects to external constraints in initial decisions, I mitigate gender differences in altruism. Moreover, this remains true even when those external constraints are removed. However, when subjects are not initially exposed to these constraints, women are significantly more generous than men. [Portions of this paper were previously circulated under the title "Identity Formation, Gender Differences, and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes"]Recall of Repeated Games (major re-write in progress)
In repeated interactions, players frequently want to condition their behavior on past events. This requires them to recall the game's history. However, if players' memory is finite or biased, they may not be able to accurately remember previous play. Using an experiment on the Finitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, I examine individuals' recall of a repeated game. I first establish evidence on general trends for recall (in)accuracy in a repeated game environment. I find evidence that memory is both finite and biased, with both the timing of information and specific outcomes being associated with recall accuracy. I then develop a method to estimate individual subjects' strategies from their observed behavior to analyze how memory is associated with behavioral outcomes (strategy and strategy implementation). I find that subjects frequently remember using a different strategy than they actually did, and they recall making fewer implementation errors for their recalled strategy. The number of strategy implementation errors is negatively correlated with subjects' recall accuracy of the history.Memory and Investment in Risk Reduction, with Haseeb Ahmed and Shanthi Manian
Gendered Outcome Bias, with Brianna Halladay and Rachel Landsman
Signaling Gender in Experiments, with Brianna Halladay and Rachel Landsman
Fear of Failure or Fear of Success? The Role of Task Stereotypes and Appropriateness in Competition Choice, with Brianna Halladay and Rachel Landsman