Research
Published and Accepted Papers
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) - forthcoming at American Economic Journal: Microeconomics - 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) - forthcoming at Journal of Mathematical Economics - 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.
Working Papers (My arXiv page)
Behavioral Foundations of Nested Stochastic Choice and Nested Logit (with Gerelt Tserenjigmid) - 2nd round Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Political Economy
Idea: Nested logit is the most widely applied generalization of multinomial logit, but it has not been behaviorally characterized. Until now.
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.
Conservative Updating - under review
Idea: Some people do not change their beliefs enough when provided information . Here's a preference based characterization of such behavior.
Ambiguity and Partial Bayesian Updating - under review
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) - under review
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).
Work in Progress
Regret and Bounded Rationality In Games: The Focal Quantal Response Equilibrium (with Gerelt Tserenjigmid) - slides
Sincerity and the Doctrinal Paradox (with Alan Miller) - slides
Ordered Surprises (with Adam Dominiak)
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."