Research

Published and Accepted Papers

• Behavioral Foundations of Nested Stochastic Choice and Nested Logit (with Gerelt Tserenjigmid) - Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 130(9): 2411-2461, September 2022 

  • Idea: Nested logit is the most widely applied generalization of multinomial logit, but it has not been behaviorally characterized. Until now.

• Twisting the Truth: Foundations of Wishful Thinking - Theoretical Economics, Vol. 15(3): 989–1022, July 2020.

  • Idea: Wishful thinking based on an endowment "twists" beliefs a bit. Behavioral consequences inside. 

• Satisficing with a Variable Threshold (with Levent Ulku) -  Journal of Mathematical Economics, Vol. 87: 67-76, March 2020.  slides

  • Idea: What can we say about a satisficer with an unobserved and changing notion of "good enough?"

• The Focal Luce Model (with Gerelt Tserenjigmid) - American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Vol. 14(3): 378-413, August 2022 - online appendix 

  • Idea: Multinomial logit is great, but what if a decision maker pays more attention to some alternatives than others? It turns out you can identify these "focal" alternatives and distinguish utility from bias. 

• A Model of Stochastic Choice from Lists (with Levent Ulku and Yuhta Ishii) -  Journal of Mathematical Economics, Vol. 96: October 2021 -  slides

  • Idea: Menu variation is great, but what if all you can change is the order of alternatives? Can we still learn about preferences?  Yes.

• Ambiguity and Partial Bayesian Updating - conditionally accepted at Economic Theory. 

  • Idea: How should a set of beliefs be updated?  One way is to first select those that are "pretty likely" given the data, then use Bayes' rule.  You can find a behavioral analysis of this and more inside. 

Working Papers  (My arXiv page)

• Minimum Distance Belief Updating with General Information (with Adam Dominiak and Gerelt Tserenjigmid) 

  • Idea: You are told that some outcome of interest will occur with some range of probabilities. How do you update your beliefs?  The answer to this and more inside. 

• Inertial Updating (with Adam Dominiak and Gerelt Tserenjigmid) - under review - NEW!

  • Idea: A framework for belief updating unifying Bayesian and non-Bayesian updating rules, along with rules for updating on null-events. 

• Conservative Updating - under revision

  • Idea: Some people do not change their beliefs enough when provided information . Here's a preference based characterization of such behavior. 

• Reference Dependence and Random Attention (with Elchin Suleymanov) -revised and resubmitted at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

  • Idea: How does a status quo interact with random attention? 

  • This paper combines and supersedes "Thinking Inside the Box: Status Quo Bias and Stochastic Consideration" (Kovach 2016) and "Stochastic Attention and Search" (Suleymanov 2018).

• Selling to Wishful Thinkers (with Tommy Chan) - coming soon, preliminary draft available upon request. 

  • Idea: Some people are overestimate the chances of good events.  You can exract surplus from such wishful thinkers by introducing uncertainty.

• The Focal Quantal Response Equilibrium (with Gerelt Tserenjigmid) - under review - NEW!

  • Idea: Some options draw more attention than others, even after controlling for their utilities. We incorporate this idea into a strategic setting and show accounting for focality explains some experimenal findings.

Work in Progress

• Sincerity and the Doctrinal Paradox (with Alan Miller) - slides

• Motivated Reasoning in Probability Updating  (An experiment, with Matthew Chao)

  • This study is supported by a grant from the Moore Foundation

• Frame Sensitive Voters and Electoral Competition

Permanent Working Papers

• Thinking Inside the Box: Status Quo Bias and Stochastic Consideration - working paper - these results have been incorporated into "Reference Dependence and Random Attention."

• Ordered Surprises and Conditional Probability Systems (with Adam Dominiak and Gerelt Tserenjigmid)  -  major results have been incorporated into "Inertial Updating."

  • Idea: How do you revise your beliefs when you're surprised? We introduce a notion of ordered (im)possibility and show that it provides a simpler foundation for CPS.