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“Preference over Choices”
Job Market Paper (retitled and updated, November 2026)
Presented at: Fall 2026 Midwest Economic Theory Conference ·
2026 Durham Economic Theory Conference ·
2026 Workshop on Choice & Welfare (QMUL) ·
2025 BSE Summer Forum ·
2024 Asian School in Economic Theory ·
2024 PETCO poster session
Bringing about the same outcome can earn praise, blame, or neither, depending on what was given up and at what cost. I develop a decision-theoretic model of these judgments, which underlie how people reward and punish one another. From an observer's ranking of another person's choices (outcome–menu pairs), I separate her valuation of outcomes from her praise or blame for choosing them. She compares his actual choice with the one she expects and credits him for the sacrifice she expects him to make. These expectations depend on what she thinks ought to be chosen and what she believes he values. Hence, the more difficult she believes doing the right thing is for him, the more she praises success and the less she blames failure. The model explains why observers who agree on what ought to be chosen can disagree about praise and blame. By deriving these judgments from an observer's preferences, the model clarifies the restrictions built into familiar measures of kindness in theories of reciprocity and accommodates judgments those measures exclude.
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“Consistency and Strategic Disclosure in Model-based Persuasion”
Presented at: 2026 Stony Brook International Conference on Game Theory ·
2026 PETCO poster session
Persuasion often works by supplying a model through which observed data are interpreted. I study persuasion when the receiver, beyond requiring that the model fit the observed signals well, demands that it be consistent, treating the signals as independent and identical draws rather than reading meaning into patterns. I characterize the persuasion cost of consistency in terms of the entropy of the empirical distribution of the signals, so that the more the signals differ from one another, the weaker the persuasive power. I then consider a sender who privately observes the signals and discloses only part of them at the time of persuasion, before the receiver sees the rest. When the signals are not all alike, the sender can avoid the cost of consistency entirely and fully manipulate the receiver's beliefs. When they are all identical, disclosing more of them makes the signals easier to fit, but consistency limits how much this added evidence can work in the sender's favor. The optimal disclosure is either a single signal or all signals; a single signal is best only when the receiver initially reads the signal as sufficiently bad news.
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“Preference over Indifference”
Can indifference itself be desirable? People may value another person’s indifference as open-mindedness or dislike it as a lack of commitment. I develop an axiomatic model of how people evaluate others’ choices when decision-makers can declare indifference among several options. I characterize a “no preference for indifference” condition under which declaring indifference does not by itself contribute to the value of choices. I discuss deviations from this condition.
