Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Energy and Environment
Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Dublin
Applied microeconomics · Behavioural economics · Environmental economics
CV (PDF) · Job market paper (PDF) · Email
I use experiments and surveys to study how information, incentives, and institutional design shape household energy choices, cooperation, and responses to policy.
I completed my PhD in Business and Economics at the University of Amsterdam in 2025.
Beyond Conformity: Framing Social Information When Preferred Choices Are Uncommon
With Stefano Ceolotto, Deirdre Robertson, and Niall Farrell.
Descriptive social information is understood to influence behaviour by showing what others do. We provide evidence that the effects are not uniformly conformist: they depend on the underlying distribution and whether typicality or improvement is salient. In a preregistered experiment, 1,828 consumers chose appliances in a retailer-style shopping task and a discrete-choice experiment. We compared no social information with two frames derived from the same reference distribution. ‘Direct Comparison’ reported shares choosing each energy-efficiency label, whereas ‘Positive Deviance’ reported shares choosing less efficient alternatives. Direct Comparison increased selection of energy-efficient choices when efficient options were common, producing mixed responses when they were uncommon, including a greater propensity to choose the least efficient option. Positive Deviance increased selection for efficient options whether efficiency was common or uncommon, without increasing selection of the least efficient option. We argue this is because descriptive social information shapes the comparison standard used to evaluate choices.
“Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial