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Here is a link to my research, my teaching and my bio.

Welcome!

I am a postdoc and a teaching fellow at the Economics Department at Harvard. 
 
My research focuses on collective action and communication failures, and how leaders and policies can improve these outcomes. I approach these questions through novel theoretical and empirical approaches to social expectations -- individuals' motivation to do what they think others want. My work shows how social expectations lead to novel predictions about collective action, serves as a bridge between scholarly traditions, and its impact can be experimentally measured. 
 

The core of my theoretical work is a model of presumed conformity, in which members of a group are motivated to signal that their preference matches what they believe is the majority group preference. Equilibrium dynamics can result in a perverse failure of collective action in which individuals act in a way they mistakenly believe is cooperative, or `pluralistic ignorance'.

In lab experiments Michael Hiscox and I tested the role of social expectations in decisions to influence and be influenced by others to act pro-socially. In an online experiment and a field experiment (with Sam Asher) I use national primes to test how social expectations over donating to co-regionals and co-nationals interact.

In terms of my field work, I have partnered with a Mexican NGO with which I design and implement experiments. Ben Golub, Evan Sadler and I were recently awarded a grant from the Foundations of Human Behavior to test the impact of playdate group composition on social expectations and neurodevelopment.