Alina Velias

 Welcome to my website!  I am an experimental economist, interested in applications of behavioural theory to better understand how people make decisions in critical domains such as health, the environment, and prosocial behaviour. I am currently a London School of Economics Fellow at the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. I am also participating in an ERC-funded project titled “Smart Water Futures: Designing the Next Generation of Urban Drinking Water Systems”. I gained my PhD at the department of Economics at City, University of London. 

Working Papers

Publications

Work in Progress

I process Wikipedia archives in all major languages to extract data and build a granular time-series dataset to create a new measure of social capital.

Classic (deterministic) models of dynamically inconsistent preferences posit that agents who anticipate own future lapses of self-control can benefit from costly commitment, such as contracts that penalise these lapses. Empirical evidence shows that many temporaly-inconsistent individuals either do not demand commitment or buy commitment contract and default on it. This paper explores to what extent this evidence is explained by individuals’ biased beliefs about their future performance. We use controlled experimental environment to manipulate biased expectations in form of optimistic/pessimistic forecasts of future performance. This allows us to isolate the role of beliefs in suboptimal use of commitment. 

Education

CV (in PDF)