Wilcox Family Chair in Entrepreneurial Economics, UCSB Economics
I am a behavioral, cognitive, and experimental economist who studies attention and perception (how information is processed) and information disclosure (how information is communicated). My current research explores how human and AI interactions are shaped by attention, perception, and information disclosure.
Current Research Focus
We demonstrate the failure of the aligned learning premise in two focal machine learning applications and rationalize this failure using an economic model of incentive design with endogenous information acquisition.
We experimentally study belief updating when a decision maker does not know the DGP, but learns from qualitative statements such as AI recommendations.
We provide field evidence that AI oversight can affect human decision-making by investigating Hawk-Eye review of umpires in top tennis tournaments.
We use an experiment with a real work task to study whether workers change behavior when they know AI will be used to judge their work instead of humans.
We investigate whether ideas from cognitive science can mitigate cognitive constraints and biases in crowdsourced datasets and improve models trained on these data.
We run a field experiment on DiagnosUs to address the prevalence effect in the AI lifecycle.
We use a controlled experiment to show that ability and belief calibration jointly determine the benefits of working with AI.
We investigate whether the predictions of modern machine learning algorithms are consistent with economic models of human cognition.
We survey academics about norms around reporting ChatGPT use in manuscript preparation and test GPT-modified abstracts with AI detection software.
We propose an approach to AI-augmented decision-making systems that uses human labeler uncertainty to improve accuracy and alignment with expert uncertainty.
A selected set of papers on attention, perception, and information disclosure.
American Economic Review 101 (7), 2899-2922, 2011
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 13 (2), 141-73, 2021
Journal of Political Economy 129 (11), 3185-3205, 2021
The Economic Journal 125 (582), 184-202, 2014
Games and Economic Behavior 104, 131-145, 2017
Management Science 68 (5), 3236-3261, 2022
Before receiving a PhD in Economics from NYU, I co-founded a small business that is now one of the leading providers of IT services to small and medium-sized businesses in the Carolinas.
At UCSB I teach a seminar course on entrepreneurship and a lecture class on behavioral economics. I also teach PhD classes on behavioral economics and attention and perception.
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