Research

Publications


“Emergence of Specialized Third-Party Enforcement”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120 (24), 2023. [.bib]
Joint with Erik Mohlin and Simon Weidenholzer
Main idea: Cooperation is sustained by guardians who are guarded by the guardians themselves through reputation-based community enforcement in an indefinitely repeated game.

“Discontinuous and Continuous Stochastic Choice and Coordination in the Lab”. Journal of Economic Theory 206, 105557, 2022. [.bib]
Joint with Maxim Goryunov
Main idea: We experimentally study the effect of different information structures in the behavior of participants playing coordination games of incomplete information. We do so through a novel experimental design, based on visual cues. This allows us to circumvent the language of distributions and conditional probabilities when communicating with subjects.

“The Normality Assumption in Coordination Games with Flexible Information Acquisition”, Journal of Economic Theory 203, 105485, 2022. [.bib]
Main idea: I theoretically study how large populations or rationally inattentive individuals behave in the presence of fundamental and coordination motives. Without assuming a normal prior for the fundamental, I characterize the class of equilibria in which players use continuous strategies. I demonstrate that small departures from normality can lead to distributions of equilibrium actions that differ significantly from those of Gaussian models.

“The Cry Wolf Effect in Evacuation: A Game-Theoretic Approach”, Physica A 526, 120890, 2019. [pre-print] [.bib]
Joint with Enrico Ronchi and Erik Mohlin
Main idea: We build a game-theoretic model to analyse strategic interactions in an evacuation setting. We show that if the Authority cannot accurately and confidently detect threats, then this can lead to the Authority ordering evacuations too often. As a response, Evacuees only partially comply to ordered evacuations, leading to a situation reminiscent of Aesop’s story “The Boy who Cried Wolf.”

“Evolutionary Games and Matching Rules”, International Journal of Game Theory 47(3), 707-735, 2018. [Old WP] [.bib]
Joint with Martin Kaae Jensen
Main idea: We introduce a formalism (called a matching rule) that succinctly captures any kind of non-uniformly random matching for any symmetric normal-form game in an evolutionary setting. We examine how matching affects equilibrium efficiency and show that evolutionary optima can be implemented as Nash equilibria if an appropriate matching rule is chosen.

“Assortativity Evolving from Social Dilemmas”, Journal of Theoretical Biology 395, 194-203, 2016. [pre-print] [.bib]
Joint with Heinrich H Nax
Main idea: We study populations receiving fitness by playing 2-player, 2-strategy “social dilemma” games in an evolutionary setting. The assortativity of the matching process is endogenous as individuals “vote” for more or less assortativity. We assess the extent to which the populations can overcome the tragedy of the commons.


Current Projects


“Expertise Disclosure in Markets for Credence Goods”
Joint with Maria Kozlovskaya and Matteo Foschi
Main idea: We theoretically study how heterogeneously knowledgeable buyers can optimally disclose their knowledge in order to avoid being offered unnecessary services by expert sellers. In equilibrium, it is frequently not optimal for buyers to disclose their level of knowledge, and this–when sellers are unable to distinguish “feigned ignorance” from a genuine lack of expertise–may completely eliminate seller exploitation in pooling equilibria.

“Preferences as Heuristics”
Joint with Erik Mohlin
Main idea: Preferences evolve to compensate for behavioral biases.