Research

Papers on games:

• • Predictable Effects of Bottom-up Visual Salience in Experimental Decisions and Games, Nov 2021, with Colin Camerer, forthcoming at the Quarterly Journal of Economics

Bottom-up stimulus-driven visual salience is largely automatic, effortless, and independent of a person's ``top-down" perceptual goals; it depends only on features of a visual stimulus. Algorithms have been carefully trained to predict stimulus-driven salience values for each pixel in any image. The economic question we address is whether these salience values help explain economic decisions. We test the effect of such measured visual salience in three applications: simple choice problem, two-person strategic games on images, and the traditional matrix games.

• • Hidden Markov modeling of the cognitive process in strategic thinking, April 2021, with Colin Camerer, under review at Quantitative Economics

  • A high-resolution EEG study in poker games, March 2021, with Virginia Fedrigo and Colin Camerer, link coming soon

  • Thinking About Thinking And Its Cognitive Limits, Nov 2016, with Adam Brandenburger

Papers on habit:

• New neuroeconomic ideas about habit: Neural autopilot, with Colin Camerer, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 41 (2021): 185-190

• Predicting context-sensitivity and habit formation in field data using machine-learning, with Buyalskaya et al., R&R at PNAS

Work in progress:

• • A rational inattention explanation of salience: use rational inattention framework to rationalize the bottom-up salience effect, with Colin Camerer, see my thesis Chapter three.

  • User habit for social media apps: collaboration with Snap

  • Salience and purchases from smart vending machines: manipulation of the display in the wild, with Colin Camerer

  • Does online education help the effect of learning: an empirical study on large schooling datasets before and after the pandemic, with Jiehui Zheng, Fadong Chen, and Xintong Han