Research publications and current work

Many jobs serve a social purpose beyond profit maximization. This paper uses a modified principal-agent gift-exchange game with positive externality to study how workers' prosocial motivation interacts with efficiency wages in stimulating effort. The results show that prosocial motivation and efficiency wages are independent in stimulating effort, while principals offer higher wages in the prosocial treatment because they underestimate reciprocity in the standard gift-exchange environment.

The paper develops a model of reference-dependent choice in which the reference point may be any convex combination of possible outcomes under a consumption lottery. It introduces solution concepts, characterizes them on choice data, and identifies the model's parameters.

The paper studies how organizations can choose a project mission to attract, incentivize, and screen workers. It analyzes how contractual environments shape the optimal distance between the organization's preferred mission and the agents' preferred mission.

The paper extends established models of boundedly rational choice to account for indecisive choice behavior in complex choice problems where alternatives are difficult to compare exhaustively.

The project studies when decentralized or hybrid sales channels can serve as commitment devices for manufacturers selling goods with uncertain consumption quality.

This project uses machine learning benchmarks to evaluate how much predictable variation in experimental social preference data is captured by parameterized behavioral models, including extensions with heterogeneous preference types.