Working Papers

1. Self-Presentation (with Leah Cao) 

We study how individuals form self-presentation strategies when publicly reporting their self-confidence about their personal attributes, focusing on how social image motives shape the gap between private beliefs and public reports. In a laboratory experiment, subjects first privately state their self-confidence and then report it publicly to the other participants in the session. Subjects bias their public reports toward the middle, with low-confidence individuals tending to over-report and high-confidence individuals tending to under-report. We provide evidence that under-reporting is motivated by social image concerns, whereas we find no such evidence for over-reporting. There is moderate heterogeneity in self-presentation by gender and socioeconomic status, with under-reporting more common among female subjects and over-reporting less common among those with higher socioeconomic status. Overall, self-presentation strategies make subjects appear more homogeneous in self-confidence than they actually are, making it difficult for others to infer individuals’ true attributes and reducing the accuracy of reported confidence.

2. Motivated Beliefs: The Role of Uncertainty about Information Accuracy  (with Yanshuo Hu) (submitted)

We design an experiment to study how uncertainty about information accuracy affects motivated belief formation. Subjects receive noisy signals about their IQ test performance and update their beliefs under one of three information structures: certain accuracy, where signals are correct 70% of the time; compound uncertainty, where signals are correct either 50% or 90% of the time with equal probability; and ambiguity, where signals are also correct either 50% or 90% of the time, but subjects do not know the probability of each accuracy level. To separate motivated reasoning from other biases in belief updating, subjects also update beliefs about an ego-irrelevant state, suitcase prices. Subjects update too little relative to Bayes’ rule across all treatments, in both tasks, and after all types of signals. Comparing behavior across tasks, we find evidence of motivated reasoning under certain accuracy and compound uncertainty, with subjects updating their beliefs more after good news than after bad news. This asymmetry is strongest under certain accuracy, remains marginal under compound uncertainty, and is absent under ambiguity. Our results therefore provide suggestive evidence that uncertainty about information accuracy reduces motivated belief formation, yet the differences across treatments are modest.

3. Price ceiling regulation: Evidence from the retail gasoline market (with Georgios Gatsios and Christos Genakos) (submitted)

We examine the short-run impact of price ceilings on retail gasoline prices in isolated oligopolistic markets, uniquely observing for which stations the regulation was binding and for which it was not. Leveraging daily pricing data and a difference-in-differences methodology, we find that, while binding stations naturally lowered prices, non-binding stations increased theirs, though there is substantial heterogeneity. Among non-binding stations, those with more favorable characteristics for collusion adjust prices faster, move closer to the ceiling, and exhibit lower price dispersion, consistent with more effective coordination. Our results provide evidence that the price ceiling acted as a focal point for collusion among non-binding stations, consistent with channels identified in tacit collusion theory.