• "Cultural Transmission with Incomplete Information," Della Lena, S., Panebianco, F. (2021).  Journal of Economic Theory, 198, 105373. (Preprint, SSRN)

• "On the Transmission of Guilt Aversion and the Evolution of Trust," Della Lena, S., Manzoni, E., & Panebianco, F.  (2023). Games and Economic Behavior, 142, 765-793. (Preprint, SSRN) 

•  "The Spread of Misinformation in Networks with Social and Individual Learning" (2024).  European Economic Review, 168, 104804.  (Preprint, SSRN)

WORKING PAPERS and R&R

• Affective Polarization, Media Outlet, and Opinion Dynamics  (2023),  with L. Merlino and Y. Zenou. (CEPR) R&R Review of Economic Studies  [2nd round]

• An Economic Model of Acculturation under Strategic Complements and Substitutes (2025), with P. Dindo.  (SSRN, 2024) R&R Journal of Economic Theory

• From Parenting to Hiring: Investment in Human Capital, Social Networks, and Firms’ Choices (2024), with S. Safi and Y. Zenou (CEPR) R&R American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

• How do you know you won’t like it if you’ve never tried it? Preferences discovery and strategic bundling (2025), with A. Muscillo and P. Pin.  (SSRN, 2024)

Consumers discover their preferences through experience, yet the sequence and compo- sition of those experiences are often designed—by platforms, algorithms, or policymakers. Adopting a “data-design” approach to preference discovery, we study how the structure of consumption data affect learning. When experiences are bundled, the co-occurrence of goods creates a network of correlation externalities that shapes how consumption surprise propagates across products. Using tools from OLS estimation and spectral analysis, we characterize the conditions that favor learning and preference discovery and those that sustain bias. The framework introduces a new way to think about learning from designed data, providing a foundation for new theoretical and applied work on preference discovery and belief manipulation. A toy empirical example from the movie industry illustrates the model’s key mechanisms.

• God, Guilt, and Giving: Public Good Contribution among Catholics and Protestants (2025), with F. Cinnirella, E. Manzoni, and F. Panebianco (CEPR)

We study how religious ethics shape contributions to public goods by developing a theoretical model that characterizes Protestants and Catholics as representing, respectively, an individualistic and a collectivistic ethic. Both are motivated by a fixed contribution target and by the desire not to disappoint others, but Protestants place more weight on the individual target while Catholics place more weight on social expectations. The model predicts no differences at low incomes, but diverging patterns at middle and upper incomes, with Catholics’ contributions shaped by community composition. Using German panel data, we find evidence consistent with these predictions and flatter income responses among Catholics. 

• Zero-sum environments, public good provision, and social connectedness (2025) with Y. Jansen and Y. Zenou

We study a public good game on a network where agents can either contribute to a public good or extract rents, thus generating a public bad. We characterize equilibrium contributions and show that both existence and structure depend on network density. In dense networks, the opportunity for rent extraction induces cyclic behavior: players alternate between full public good provision and full rent extraction, yielding non-monotonic welfare outcomes. When the network is endogenously formed, equilibrium among homogeneous agents produces regular directed networks in which all players contribute equally. This reveals a fundamental rela- tionship between the degree of zero-sumness in the strategic environment, public good provision, and social connectedness: as zero-sumness increases, equilibrium public good provision rises while network density declines.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

• "Why Do Consumers Prefer One Brand Over Another? The Economics and Sociology of Brand Competitiveness," Della Lena, S, Timming, A (2023) .  Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 74, 103416. Special issue ‘Brand Competitiveness’ [invited submission].

WORK IN PROGRESS