I am a Ph.D. Candidate on the Job Market in 2025-2026 at the University of California San Diego. My research uses controlled laboratory experiments to examine how people make choices in controlled environments in order to better understand how they think and make decisions.
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My interests most often involve questions about how people think about other people in strategic settings. My job market paper (linked below) studies how people behave in environments that they suspect may be manipulated by others, where deducing if that is the case involves an interaction of statistical and strategic reasoning. I have also studied how people bargain in the presence of strategic messaging, and whether or not people choose to paternalistically intervene in others' choices when they have better (or worse) information than those others. In the individual decision making space, I have also studied how cognitive biases (in particular, anchoring and insufficient adjustment) can lead to errors in most-likely event prediction.
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In my free time, I like to play tennis, rock climb, and meet with friends for board games (putting my ability to predict how people think and behave to the test!). I am also an avid poker player, escape room aficionado, and musical theater enthusiast.
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My CV is available here.
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You can find my Job Market Paper here.
About Me
Job Market Paper
Research
Skeptical Exit in Games
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Abstract:: People often face environments which they suspect may be manipulated. Deciding when to avoid or exit such environments due to skepticism is important, but difficult, requiring not only statistical inference but also strategic inference: when a manipulator may intentionally conceal their manipulation, the problem becomes a game, rather than a simple decision. With multiple potential sources of error, do people on average exit too soon, or alternatively too late from these types of environments, and what mechanisms drive this exit if so?
Using a laboratory experiment implementing a novel adversarial bandit design, I vary the possibility and source of manipulation (from another person, or from a computer) as well as whether the extent of manipulation is revealed, and whether participants receive correct Bayesian posteriors to help make their exit decisions. This design isolates the effects of statistical misinference, strategic misprediction, and other-regarding preferences to identify the sources of over- or under- exit, if they exist. I find evidence of neither over- nor under-exit: subjects’ exit decisions are on average consistent across a high-uncertainty base game and a low-uncertainty control condition that removes the effects of the inferential and strategic mechanisms. This holds even though elicited beliefs on average substantially overestimate the likelihood of manipulation. These results contribute to literatures in biased statistical inference, games of hidden information, multi-armed bandits, and a growing social science of conspiratorial thinking.
Other Work
Messaging in Bargaining: To Name your Price or Not to Name Your Price?
Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics
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Abstract: Using a laboratory experiment, I examine how the presence of specific forms of strategic communication influences participants’ strategies and outcomes in ultimatum-style bargaining games. Despite theoretical predictions of babbling, subjects appear to treat messages as if they are credible, leading to substantial gains for subjects using messaging. I further characterize player types, and suggest that my data may be explained by a ”cheap talk with lying costs”-style model.
Paternalism: an Information Account
In Progress
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Abstract: I consider the role of information quality differences between individuals on a person's decision to intervene in another's choice or not. I estimate and compare an “information premium” - a measure of how much stronger of a signal one needs in order to intervene, to examine conditions when people are more or less likely to do so. I find stark differences in information premia between decisions occurring before the potential paternalist knows their own and their target's signals compared to after, indicating a significant role of contingent thinking in this exercise.
Anchoring and Insufficient Adjustment Affects Most-Likely Event Estimation (with Jonathan Bogard)
In Progress
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Abstract: In a series of experiments, we show that subjects fail to correctly answer a maximum-likelihood state-guessing exercise as a result of a spontaneous anchor on a salient central option. Subject responses are demonstrated to be in the majority incorrect, susceptible to alternative arbitrary anchors, and over-report the hypothesized arbitrary anchor in absence of a signal. Results have implications for belief elicitation methods.
Teaching
In Fall 2025, I am the principal instructor for Econ 100C (Intermediate Microeconomics C).
Current students can reach the class page and materials at our Canvas Page
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In addition to teaching as a primary instructor, I have also been a teaching assistant for the following courses:
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Principles of Microeconomics
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Intermediate Microeconomics (A/B/C)
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Economics of the Environment
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Economics of Discrimination
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Industrial & Organizational Economics
EconLab
From 2022 to 2025 I was the Lab Manager for the EconLab at UCSD, currently located in SSRB 165. I managed scheduling, recruitment, day to day operation of the lab, and supported running experiments for faculty and graduate students engaged in in-person experimental research.
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To go to the EconLab website, click here.
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If you are a current UCSD student and would like to become a subject, go the link above and click "request account", then sign in with your UCSD Single Sign On. Most studies are available for UCSD students 18 years old and above.