Publications

Critical Mass in Collective Action (with José-Alberto Guerra and Warn Nuarpear Lekfuangfu), forthcoming at Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics.

A Flexible Measure of Voter Polarization, Economics Letters, March 2026,  261: 112834.

A Simple Model of Competitive Testing, Economic Inquiry, July 2025, 63(3): 888-902 (latest draft here).

Slacktivism, Journal of Theoretical Politics, March 2023, 35(2): 126–143 (latest draft here).

Counting on My Vote Not Counting: Expressive Voting in Committees (with José-Alberto Guerra and Warn Nuarpear Lekfuangfu), Journal of Public Economics, January 2022, 205: 104555 (latest draft here).

Social Connectivity, Media Bias, and Correlation Neglect (with Philipp Denter and Martin Dumav), Economic Journal, July 2021, 637: 2033-2057 (latest draft here).

Optimal Price of Entry into a Competition, Economic Inquiry, January 2021, 59(1): 280-286 (latest draft here).

Optimal Information Censorship, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, July 2019, 163: 377-385 (latest draft here).

When Collective Ignorance Is Bliss: Theory and Experiment on Voting for Learning, with José-Alberto Guerra, Journal of Public Economics, January 2019, 169: 52-64 (latest draft here).

Sincere Voting in an Electorate with Heterogeneous Preferences, Economics Letters, May 2017, 154: 120-123 (latest draft here).

Working Papers

Troll Farms (with Philipp Denter), April 2026.

We study how coordinated disinformation campaigns affect elections. We develop a constrained information design model in which a sender deploys uninformative messages that mimic voters' exogenous informative signals. Voters initially opposed to the sender's preferred outcome receive favourable messages, while those in favour are targeted with unfavourable messages to dilute adverse information. The sender's ability to manipulate political outcomes increases with greater precision of voters' independent signals, but decreases with polarisation. When messaging is costly, the sender may stop targeting marginally opposing voters while moderating message extremism among supporters. 

Fact-Finding in Social Networks, September 2025.

This paper models voters who invest effort to determine whether a particular claim relevant to their voting choices is correct. If a voter succeeds in determining whether the claim is correct, this information is shared via a social network. I show that increased connectivity makes voters more informed about basic facts, but less informed about complicated issues. At the same time, polarization makes voters less informed overall.

Guns, pets, and strikes: an experiment on political action and social interactions (with José-Alberto Guerra), May 2025.

We study the role of political collective action in shaping subsequent social interactions. In an experiment, subjects choose whether to participate in real-world collective action. Following participation choices, we observe increased prosociality between participants, but not within other pairs. Based on this, we develop a model of participation, which predicts that higher valuation of the cause makes an individual expect higher participation by others, and higher expectation increases payoffs and makes an individual more likely to participate. We test these predictions using data from the experiment, finding support for them. This helps explain the role of coordination in collective action.

Voting behind the Veil of Ignorance, April 2025.

A committee consisting of two factions is considering a project whose distributive consequences are unknown. This uncertainty can be resolved at some unknown future time. By delaying approval, the committee can gradually learn which faction benefits from the project. Because support of both factions is required for approval, it can only happen when there is sufficient amount of uncertainty about the identities of winners and losers. I show that in many situations, a project is more likely to be approved if it gives a lower payoff to everyone. The probability of approval and expected payoffs of both factions are higher if the project is ex ante less likely to benefit the faction that tends to receive good news faster. Equilibrium amount of learning is excessive, and a deadline on adopting the project is often optimal.