Research

Publications

1. Rational Inattention in Games: Experimental Evidence (with Daniel Martin), Experimental Economics, 27 (2024), No. 4, 715–742.
   To investigate whether attention responds rationally to strategic incentives, we experimentally implement a buyer-seller game in which a fully informed seller makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to a buyer who faces cognitive costs to process information about the offer's value. We isolate the impact of seller strategies on buyer attention by exogenously varying the seller's outside option, which leads sellers to price high more often. We find that buyers respond by making fewer mistakes conditional on value, which suggests that buyers exert higher attentional effort in response to the increased strategic incentives for paying attention. We show that a standard model of rational inattention based on Shannon mutual information cannot fully explain this change in buyer behavior. However, we identify another class of rational inattention models consistent with this behavioral pattern. [Data and Analysis Files] [Appendix]

Working papers

2. Human Responses to AI Oversight: Evidence from Centre Court (with Romain Gauriot, Lionel Page, and Daniel Martin)
   Selected Coverage: The Economist - Kellogg Insight - CBC Radio - Communications ACM - Novigi - Social Warming

Extended abstract at EC'24, 15-Minute Presentation at Wharton [Video]

Powered by the increasing predictive capabilities of machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) systems have the potential to overrule human mistakes in many settings.  We provide the first field evidence that the use of AI oversight can impact human decision-making. We investigate one of the highest visibility settings where AI oversight has occurred: Hawk-Eye review of umpires in top tennis tournaments. We find that umpires lowered their overall mistake rate after the introduction of Hawk-Eye review, but also that umpires increased the rate at which they called balls in, producing a shift from making Type II errors (calling a ball out when in) to Type I errors (calling a ball in when out). We structurally estimate the psychological costs of being overruled by AI using a model of attention-constrained umpires, and our results suggest that because of these costs, umpires cared 37% more about Type II errors under AI oversight.

3.  Texting to Save Lives: Evidence from Cardiovascular Treatment Reform in Mexico (with Ari Bronsoler)
   Can low-cost, widely available technologies enhance patient outcomes in fragmented healthcare systems? We evaluate a program aimed at streamlining cross-hospital transfer coordination using group chats on a popular messaging app. The program significantly increased survival and transfer rates for heart attack patients. The greatest survival improvements occurred in general hospitals with larger productivity gaps relative to high-specialty centers and among moderately ill patients, who were healthy enough to benefit from transfer but not so critical that they could not be moved. These results provide evidence that simple, scalable digital solutions can improve critical care outcomes and contribute to better patient allocation across hospitals in fragmented networks.

Work in progress

4. When AI Judges Your Work: Behavioral Responses to Algorithmic Oversight (with Lucas Lippman and Daniel Martin)