Research
Job Market Paper
Incentives, Distributions, and the Accuracy of Subjective Health Risks (R&R, Experimental Economics)
Beliefs about personal health risks shape health decisions, and researchers have long studied these beliefs through surveys. However, none have tested whether monetary incentives increase thoughtful or truthful responses. This paper tests whether such incentives improve the accuracy of elicited beliefs about personal health risks. I also evaluate the role of confidence in health expectations by comparing two response modes - point estimates, and complete belief distributions - in a 2×2 treatment design. In an online sample of U.S. adults, I elicit subjects’ beliefs about their risk of common chronic health conditions, which I compare to highly personalized statistical estimates. Monetary incentives reduce error size by 4.8 percentage points when subjects report complete belief distributions, but have no effect on point estimates. Importantly, beliefs more strongly predict preventive health behaviors when they exhibit high confidence, suggesting that eliciting both risk perceptions and confidence may improve our understanding of health decisions.
Work in Progress
Out-of-Pocket Statin Expenditures after 2016 USPSTF Recommendation: Private Insurance vs Medicaid (Under Review)
Examines the impact of 2016 USPSTF guidelines that recommended statins for cardiovascular disease prevention, triggering an ACA mandate for zero cost-sharing. Using Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data and event study analysis, we find privately insured patients experienced a 23.5% increase in zero cost-sharing and $39 annual reduction in out-of-pocket costs relative to Medicaid enrollees. Despite the mandate, nearly half of eligible privately insured patients still face non-zero costs, suggesting substantial implementation frictions remain.
Defaults, Social Observability, and Norm Messaging: Evidence from Coffee Shop Tips
I explore the social determinants of tipping behavior via a norm-nudge natural field experiment and field data collected from a number of small coffee shops. I find that simple messaging of local descriptive norms are insufficient for altering tipping behavior in my setting. I also observe that "smart tipping" approaches available in point-of-sale systems increase tip revenues dramatically by leveraging discontinuities in tipping behavior. I also leverage natural variation in customer timing to explore the effects of observability on norm compliance.
Resource Endogeneity and Conditional Cooperation in Social Dilemma Games
Investigates whether the origin of shared resources—created through collective action versus pre-existing—influences cooperative behavior in social dilemma games. Implements a novel two-stage experimental design (N=300) combining public goods provision with subsequent contribution/extraction decisions. Key findings: subjects exhibit negative reciprocity when group resources are endogenously low, extracting 1.4-1.5 tokens more than when resources are exogenous; 50% of subjects display conditional cooperation patterns independent of reciprocal motives; unconditional contribution strategies decrease by 13% when resources are endogenously created. Results inform policy design for maintaining public goods and managing common-pool resources, suggesting that the history of resource creation affects citizens' willingness to contribute to or preserve shared assets.