Publications

How Do Value Functions Track Underlying Reward Distributions? (with Vered Kurtz-David, Stefan Bucher, Adam Brandenburger, Kenway Louie, Paul Glimcher, Agnieszka Tymula)  Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2023

Abstract: We investigate how human choosers adapt their value encoding strategy to the statistics of the choice environment. Specifically, we ask whether the human value encoding mechanism exhibits divisive normalization only in the Pareto-distributed environments in which it is information-maximizing. To test this theory, we conduct a risky choice experiment in which subjects are presented with blocks of choice stimuli drawn from either a Pareto-distributed environment or a uniform-distributed environment. Our results show that subjects exhibit some degree of normalization regardless of whether it is efficient or not, but do adapt the curvature of their encoding function to the environment. These findings suggest that human value coding mechanisms are flexible but biologically constrained to be perfectly efficient only in specific environments. This study provides new insights into the neural mechanism of human decision-making and the role of environmental statistics in shaping it.

Working Papers

Sour Grapes in the Lab and Field: A Test of Access-Based Beliefs  (Under Review) 

Beliefs are a function of choice sets: Lowering the probability of an alternative in a choice set lowers beliefs of its value.

An (Other Person’s) Endowment Effect: Conformity and Non-conformity in Consumption Choice  (Under Review)

Individuals display preferences for non-conformity when aware of the consumption choices of others, and the standard endowment effect disappears.  

Price Expectations And Reference-Dependent Preferences ((with Stephen Cheung and Robert Routledge)  (Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization)

Increasing the expected sales price leads to a lower willingness to accept, but results are insignificant even when controlling for loss aversion.

The Impact of Background Uncertainty on Risk-Taking (with Agnieszka Tymula, Hyundam Je and Mahdi Akbar) (e-mail for a draft: v.alladi@gmail.com)

Background ambiguity reduces investment in a positive expected-value investment relative to background risk 

Indonesia's Informal Economy: Measurement, Evidence (with Christine Ablaza and Utz Pape)  (World Bank Working Paper Series)

We cover the literature and evidence on informality regarding Indonesia, including key definitons, existing data sources and previous. We identify remaining gaps in the empirical literature and use this to construct an agenda for future work.