I am a Ph.D. student in Economics at Uppsala University in Sweden. I am also affiliated with the Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies. My research is in microeconomic theory, experimental economics, and political economy. I am on the job market in the Fall 2022 and I will be available for interviews at the ASSA meeting and the European Job Market.

Twitter summary of JMP

During 2022 I have presented my JMP at: TSE BID Workshop; Institute For Advanced Study in Toulouse experimental design workshop; Seminaire Parisien de Théorie des Jeux; CAGE Summer School; 2022 Conference on Mechanism and Institution Design; Women in Economic Theory 2022 Conference, The University of Chicago; ESA North America Meeting 2022, Santa Barbara; University of Konstanz; Behavioral Economics Workshop, Stockholm School of Economics. (Upcoming:) European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, Berlin.

Current research

Sequential voting with costly information (Job market paper) PDF

Abstract: Sequential voting is used in a wide variety of settings: legal, political, expert committees, and social decision-making. This paper is the first to explain why late voters sometimes follow the first voter, commonly known as herding, and why they sometimes get to cast the deciding vote. I extend the standard sequential voting model with a cost of information and show how the information environment uniquely determines the voting and information aggregation outcome. Two types of equilibrium exist. In the first type, there are 'Devil's advocates,' players who support an opposite argument to make people think seriously in information environments where the cost of information or the signal precision is high. In the second type of equilibrium, bandwagons occur because the cost or signal precision is low. A lab experiment, which closely matches the model, confirms the main theoretical predictions. I analyze several fundamental policy implications based on the theoretical and experimental findings. For one, I show that a sequential mechanism performs better than a simultaneous voting mechanism both theoretically and experimentally, where the round-payoff is 22 percent higher in the sequential voting treatment. Second, when players face different information costs, I define the ordering of voters that maximizes total welfare. Finally, I also show that this mechanism often performs as well as an unconstrained social planner or when information costs are divisible across players.

A Theory of Hypocrisy (with Daniel Spiro) CESifo WP

R&R Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Resubmitted.

Abstract: This paper explains the occurrence of hypocrisy – when the by-society most despised types pretend to be the most revered types. Real-world phenomena include pedophile priests, sex-offender feminists and seemingly very busy dispensable office workers. Building on the signaling framework of Bernheim (1994) – where payoffs consist of an intrinsic cost of falsifying yourself, and a concern for social esteem – we show conditions for emergence of hypocrisy in equilibrium. In such equilibria the most despised types along with the most revered types behave normatively, others do not. Thus, in equilibrium there are “rumors” about those acting the most normatively – society infers that they are either truly normative or despised, but one cannot know who is who. This is to be distinguished from “conformity” – where the most normative and almost-normative types fully follow a social norm. Whether conformity or hypocrisy will arise in equilibrium depends on the cost of falsification, and the number of hypocrites depends on the weight of social esteem. Our theory thus shows how cultural parameters map into equilibrium culture.