Matthew Kovach - 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. [arXiv]
- Idea: Nested logit is the most widely applied generalization of multinomial logit, but it has not been behaviorally characterized. Until now.
- Finalist, 2023 Exeter Prize

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 - Economic Theory. [arXiv]
- 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.

Reference Dependence and Random Attention (with Elchin Suleymanov) - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Vol. 215: 421-441, November 2023. [arXiv]
- - 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).

Working Papers (My arXiv page)

Inertial Updating with General Information (with Adam Dominiak and Gerelt Tserenjigmid) - UPDATED!
- 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 a characterization of f-divergences inside.
  - This paper was previously titled Minimum Distance Updating With General Information.

Inertial Updating (with Adam Dominiak and Gerelt Tserenjigmid) - NEW!
- Idea: A framework for belief updating unifying Bayesian and non-Bayesian updating rules, along with rules for updating on null-events.

Learning Source Biases: Multisource Misspecifications and Their Impact on Predictions (with Junnan He, Lin Hu and Anqi Li) - Revise and Resubmit at American Economic Review
- Idea: How do you learn about media sources when you misperceive the bias in news reports? Learn about that and more here. [SSRN] [arXiv]

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.

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

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.