Research
Research fields
Behavioral and Experimental Economics: Unethical behavior (dishonesty and deception); Social norms; Strategic sophistication; Morality.
Game Theory: Evolution; Learning; Convention selection.
Working papers
Who's the deceiver? Identifying deceptive intentions in communication. (with L. Polonio and E. Bilancini) Accepted subject to minor revision at Games and Economic Behavior. Previously known as "Analyzing deception, honesty, and trustworthiness in sender-receiver games". Presented at the below conferences: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 and 13.
Abstract: Recognizing people's deceptive intentions when communicating is crucial to detect statements that may drive us to unintended harmful decisions. This paper studies individuals' intentions in games where players can tell the truth with deceiving purposes. In a preregistered experiment, we combine a sender-receiver game with possible strategic considerations and the associated belief elicitation questionnaire, with a sender-receiver game with no room for strategic considerations. We propose a new method that improves the identification of senders' intentions to deceive. Our findings reveal that relying solely on the strategic sender-receiver game and the elicited beliefs, as previously proposed in the literature, can lead to misinterpreting the actual intentions of a substantial proportion of senders. In particular, our new method helps discern actual deceivers from pessimistic truth-tellers and identifies senders who try to excuse their previous deceiving message. All in all, our method identifies more senders with deceptive intentions compared to previous methods.
Evolution of Conventions in Uncertain Environments. (with E. Bilancini and L. Boncinelli) Under review at Economic Theory. Presented at the below conferences: 4 and 6.
Abstract: We study the role of uncertainty in the evolution of conventions in coordination games when agents are myopic best responders. We introduce uncertainty of the choice environment by means of an ergodic Markov process ruling the switching across a collection of 2-player symmetric coordination games with the same strategy sets but different payoffs, referred to as scenarios. We apply stochastic stability analysis to study the selection of equilibria in the long run when there are multiple scenarios with diverse characteristics. We show that the stochastically stable states may be entirely determined by one or more scenarios that are played very rarely, so changing dramatically any prediction based exclusively on the most likely scenarios. Moreover, we show that the error model determines which scenarios play such crucial role, indicating that any abstraction from low probability scenarios should be evaluated in the light of the considered error model. Finally, we show how to compute the radius and the coradius of a convention in this setup.
Work in progress
Is lying always condemnable? The effect of consequences on punishing dishonesty (Job-market paper) [Collecting data] Presented at the below conferences: 9, 11 and 14.
Conferences and seminars
2024
14) 13th Southern Europe Experimental Team’s Meeting (SEET 2024). University of Malaga (Spain), February 2024.
2023
13) 48th Symposium of the Spanish Economic Association (SAEe 2023). University of Salamanca (Spain), December 2023.
12) 64th Symposium of the Italian Economic Association (SIE 2023). Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila (Italy). October 2023.
11) 10th Meeting of the Behavioural and Experimental Economics Network. University of Trento, Trento (Italy). September 2023.
10) 2023 ESA world meeting (ESAWorld23). University of Lyon, Lyon (France), June 2023.
9) 12th Southern Europe Experimental Team’s Meeting (SEET 2023). University of Valencia, Valencia (Spain). February 2023.
2022
8) 47th Symposium of the Spanish Economic Association. University of Valencia, Valencia (Spain). December 2022.
7) Workshop on Model Evaluation and Causal Search: Empirical and Experimental Approaches. University of Pisa, Pisa (Italy). September 2022.
6) XVI GRASS Workshop. Marche Polytechnic University, Ancona (Italy). September 2022.
5) European Economic Science Association Conference 2022 (ESABOLOGNA2022). University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy). September 2022.
4) Learning, Evolution, and Games conference (LEG2022). IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Lucca (Italy). July 2022.
3) Workshop on Strategic Information Transmission (SIT2022). University of Alicante, Alicante (Spain). June 2022.
2) Young Economists’ Meeting 2022 (YEM 2022). Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic). May 2022
2021
1) 6th Meeting of the Behavioral and Experimental Economics Network (VI BEEN 2021). University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy). September 2021.