Background and Interests

University staff webpage

Education

My PhD is in Economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Positions

Before my current position with the University of Technology Sydney, I held regular positions at the George Washington University and Rutgers University. I have also had the opportunity to visit at a number of institutions, including the Santa Fe Institute, the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance (CeNDEF) at the University of Amsterdam, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan), the University of New South Wales, and UC San Diego.

Main Research Interests

Learning and Bounded Rationality, Financial Markets, Heterogeneous Agent Models, Agent-Based Modeling, Social Networks, Experimental Economics, Nonlinear Dynamics

Research

I have explored issues related to information and learning in a variety of settings, often employing a combination of mathematical and computational analysis.

Financial Markets: Across a number of projects, I make the case that noisy private fundamental information invites market-based strategies. Together, these preclude the existence of a rational expectations equilibrium and the dynamics induced by traders' efforts to learn to exploit the imperfect market precludes a fixed-point. Market-based traders can be better informed than their fundamentally informed counterparts, earning profits while contributing to improve market efficiency. The success of market-based strategies can create rare and short-lived mismatches between the market structure and trader belief, producing sudden substantial mis-pricing. In addition to developing the models generating these market attributes, I have collaborated on empirical projects examining the adaptive behavior of traders switching between fundamental and market based strategies.

Current investigations explore the possibility of investors sharing private information. In a financial market model, traders balance the loss of monopoly ownership of the private signal with an improved understanding of the market. In separate a collaborative effort, investors selectively share information in a race with others to discover the value of a project.

Social Networks: I have ongoing projects exploring individual and aggregate behavior within a linked population desiring conformity and influence. I find that populations should identify and coalesce around a single leader. The ex post heterogeneity can be accomplished by a ex ante homogeneous population adaptively chasing rewards. Individuals can influence the evolution of the network through their actions, so I am also interested in identifying individually and socially advantageous behavior.

Decision Making: I am interested in modeling the process of collecting information in advance of a major decision. I am particularly interested in how consumers filter the possibly expansive list of information resources in support of their decision.

I have, on occasion, pursued other projects, including empirical projects in finance, social medial, and applied micro-theory.