"Savage in the Market" Download program Abstract We develop a behavioral axiomatic characterization of Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) under risk aversion. Given is an individual agent's behavior in the market: assume a finite collection of asset purchases with corresponding prices. We show that such behavior satisfies a revealed preference axiom if and only if there exists a…

"The Labor Market Returns to Political Connections" abstract In this paper we document the labor market returns to being a family member of a politician in office. To this purpose, we link data for 16 years on the universe of politicians in Italy with a 1/91 random sample of private sector employees, based on the…

"An Experiment on Social Mislearning" abstract We investigate theories of social learning in two experiments based on simple arithmetic that isolate errors in inference from those in Bayesian updating.  In the first experiment, players move one-person-per-period and observe all predecessors’ actions. Although 75% of participants adhere to BNE in this experiment, they realize less than one-fifth of the payoff gains…

"Endogenous Depth of Reasoning" Download the paper

"Large Contests"

"The Right Type of Legislator" abstract Research suggests that U.S. legislators represent their richer constituents. We show theoretically that this is due to the institutional structure in the US, in which legislators are expected to provide particularistic benefits to their constituents. We develop a citizen-candidate model of redistribution between both rich and poor citizens, and…

"Revealed (P)Reference Theory"

"Endogenous Enforcement Institutions" (at dipartimento di scienze economico-sociali e matematico-statistiche)

"Strategic Sample Selection"

"Individual and social indecisiveness under risk"

"Duke Grads, Monkeys, and Jobs and Wall Street: The Use and Misuse of Latent Variables" abstract We consider common Item Response Theory (IRT) measures of latent variables and consider their use as independent variables in regression analysis. We show that because of the inherent measurement error in the construction of IRT scores that OLS estimates…

"Measuring the Bias of Technological Change" Abstract When technological change occurs, it can increase the productivity of capital, labor,and the other factors of production in equal terms or it can be biased towards a specificfactor. Whether technological change favors some factors of production over othersis an empirical question that is central to economics. The literatures…

"Truthful Equilibria in Dynamic Bayesian Games"

"Decentralized Exchange" abstract This paper develops an equilibrium model of decentralized trading which accommodatesany coexisting exchanges, including networks and more general, common market structuresrepresented by hypergraphs. The model allows for any number of strategic traders and multipledivisible assets. We characterize equilibrium and welfare, and develop comparative statics withrespect to preferences, assets and market structures. Asset…

"Identifying Equilibrium Models of Labor Market Sorting"