Research
Job Market Paper
Attitudes towards Intertemporal Inequality (with Adrian Wolanski)
We provide both a theoretical and experimental approach for investigating attitudes towards intertemporal inequality. Our theoretical approach generalizes the Pigou-Dalton principle to intertemporal settings by formulating several partial orders on the space of consumption streams. One family of partial orders, whole-stream, accounts for payments received over lifetime, while the other one, period-wise, only account for the current level of inequality in each period. We then design and implement a laboratory experiment to distinguish between our orders and inequality types by empirical relevance. We find that orders which rank whole streams are extremely relevant when participants are deciding on outcomes for themselves, but are not relevant for their decisions on outcomes for others. Many of our participants instead display inequality aversion based on period-wise, rather than whole-stream, outcomes. This suggests another avenue to resolve the impossibility result of Zuber (2011).
Working Paper
Consistent Social Choice (with Adrian Wolanski)
We study the problem of a planner making social choices for groups of varying sizes and compositions. We propose a preference consistency criterion that relates members of a family of social preferences across different domains; this criterion requires preferences to be identical on domains differing only by adding agents with choice-independent payoffs. We then derive a representation theorem for a familiar functional form---an additively-separable social utility function. We then test adherence to the criterion in an online laboratory experiment, with three major findings. First, choices are more consistent within a domain size than between domain sizes. Second, choices are more consistent between domains differing by addition of agents with choice-independent payoffs than duplication of agents with choice-dependent payoffs. Third, choices are more consistent when the planner is included in both domains or neither domains and less consistent when the planner is included in exactly one of the domains. We also document the direction of inconsistencies when preferences are inconsistent, finding that planners favor increased inefficiency aversion/decreased inequality aversion as domain size increases.
Research In Progress
Decision-making with Large Language Models (with Dmitrii Kisilev and Adrian Wolanski)