Research

Working Papers

Context-Dependent Discrimination: Evidence From Emergency Triage Decisions

Draft available upon request.

Gender Bias and Differential Belief Updating

Abstract: I study whether people respond differently to identically informative signals about men and women. To ensure signals convey identical information, I develop a novel experimental design that fully fixes both prior beliefs and signal distributions across gender. In an experiment with 3,204 subjects, individuals respond dramatically to the gender of the signal-sender. Subjects are more likely to violate Bayes’ Rule, failing to update or updating in the wrong direction, after learning a woman succeeded or a man failed. They update more rationally after learning a man succeeded or a woman failed. Additional treatments explore how to mitigate these gendered mistakes.

Please Take a Minute: How Prosocial Choices Change with Deliberation 

(with Judd B. Kessler, Hannu Kivimaki, and Muriel Niederle)

Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Abstract: People often make decisions quickly when presented with a choice. Are their intuitive answers a good approximation of what they would choose if they took more time to decide? We explore how individuals' choices change with deliberation and find that later choices systematically differ from early ones. We focus on prosocial decisions and find that individuals' choices respond more to social efficiency as they deliberate over the course of a minute. Our results call into question the use of revealed preference for welfare when prosocial choices are made quickly and provide guidance to policy makers and charities.

Publications

Measuring Discrimination with Experiments 

(with Corinne Low)

In Handbook of Experimental Methods in the Social Sciences, edited by Alex Rees-Jones, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, forthcoming. 

A Conditional Cash Transfer and Women's Empowerment: Does Bolsa Familia Influence Intimate Partner Violence? 

(with Elizaveta Perova and Sarah Anne Reynolds)

Social Science and Medicine, 238 (112462), 2019.  

Work in Progress

The Glass Cliff: Leadership Selection During Crises 

Subjective Pain Signals and Worker Discretion: Evidence from Doctors  

Defaults, Response Time, and Preference Measurement