Working papers

Memory Sophistication (With Taisuke Imai)

Human memory is less than perfect, leading to mistakes in judgments and decisions. This project experimentally investigates a) whether people are sophisticated about their memory limitations, and b) whether the complexity of the memory task affects sophistication. It finds that people can be both under and overconfident about their memory and the complexity of the memory task increases the size of the mistakes. Interference makes people overconfident, instead a high amount of information to remember makes them underconfident. Confidence goes up with time mitigating underconfidence but exacerbating overconfidence. These findings show that memory sophistication is a complicated phenomenon, they indicate when memory limitations generate expensive mistakes, and they suggest how to minimize the cost of memory mistakes in the workplace.

Work in progress

Fairness views about the International Distribution of Climate Change Costs (With Johanna Kober)

Thirty years of international climate negotiations have produced shared targets, but national contributions remain voluntary and insufficient. This paper measures how citizens believe the costs of climate policy should be allocated across countries, distinguishing between three cost categories: mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. To elicit fairness views, the study introduces and validates a novel survey module. The project also measures citizens’ beliefs about their own country’s emissions and tests whether misperceptions shape policy support. Preliminary results indicate that the type of climate change cost affects the how people think the costs should be shared. For example, the weight given to current emissions for a fair allocation of mitigation costs is more than double the weight given to these emissions in the allocation of adaptation and loss and damage costs.

The economic consequences of memory limitations (With Taisuke Imai)

Since the beginning of history, humans have been codifying important information, storing it in safe and accessible ways. Recently, economists have started investigating imperfect human memory as a unifying cognitive cause of behavioral mistakes. In this paper, we develop an information acquisition model, whose assumptions are rooted in the psychological findings on human memory, to identify the contexts in which memory limitations are a promising explanation of human mistakes despite information being codified. Our results are consistent with documented empirical patterns and provide a map empiricists can use to decide whether to investigate the role of memory limitations in the settings they study.