Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

I joined Caltech this past August after three years of assistant professorship at UCLA. My research focuses on psychology and economics, and political economy. While most of my work thus far has been theoretical in nature, I have recently started utilizing experimental methodology.

In the field of psychology and economics, my joint research with David Laibson (Harvard) explores the effects of economic markets on a variety of behavioral regularities detected by psychologists and potentially relevant to investment, consumption, and savings (such as taste for immediate gratification, inability to predict one's own future preferences, etc.). While most psychological studies concentrate on individual behavior, our research is an important contribution in that it embeds psychological behavior in a truly competitive economic environment. This ties well to my previous work on agents' taste for consistency, a taste pushing them to choose beliefs, and thereby actions that maximize their overall well-being, but not their monetary payoffs. As it turns out, markets will not necessarily extinguish, or even shrink, the financial significance of such consumers.

In the field of political economy, I am particularly interested in different channels of information transmission. In my work with Dino Gerardi (Yale), we studied the effects of communication on outcomes of different voting institutions. One of the main theoretical insights was that allowing people to communicate (as in jury deliberations) makes the voting rule itself far less important for predicting outcomes. In ongoing work with Matt Jackson (Caltech) we concentrate on a variety of strategic situations (in particular, voting environments) in which communication channels are determined by a social network.

A natural way to test some of these theories is via laboratory experiments. With Jacob Goeree, a faculty in the division, I am pursuing a new research agenda on political science experimentation, including the development of jVote for running large web-based voting experiments. In addition, we instigated Caltech's Mobile Experimental Laboratory (CAMEL) to conduct experiments with non-standard subject pools, including high-school students, homeless in the LA area, and a variety of professionals.