Research

I show that the presence of an optional excuse increases costly procrastination and link this behavior to a novel psychic cost of procrastinating. In a laboratory experiment, participants allocate work between two weeks. Some decisions have uncertainty over future work that can be costlessly resolved. While 90.9 percent of decisions made with exogenously-given full information minimize overall work, 37.5 percent of participants avoid learning information needed to do so. This increases impatient behavior fourfold and total work by 10 percent. These results help explain long-standing puzzles like why people don't learn from their past impatient mistakes and have important implications for the inference of measured time preferences.

To assess the threat of experimenter demand, we ask whether a hypothetical 'ill-intentioned' researcher can manipulate inference. Four classic behavioral comparative statics are evaluated, and the potential for false inference is gauged by differentially applying strong positive and negative experimenter demand across the relevant decision pair. Evaluating three different subject pools (laboratory, Prolific, and MTurk) we find no evidence of experimenter demand eliminating or reversing directional effects. The response to experimenter demand is very limited for all three subject pools and is not large enough to generate false negatives, though we do find evidence of false positives when testing precise nulls  in larger online-subject pools.

This paper explores streaks as a novel technique to counteract impatient behavior in economics decision-making when actions have current costs but delayed benefits. Streaks are a powerful psychological motivator triggered by tracking the number of consecutive periods an action is performed, increasing the motivation for current effort. However, myopic reactions to broken streaks can lead to a tradeoff that causes streaks to backfire. We use a longitudinal real-effort experiment to study this tradeoff. We find that, conditional on working the day before, being randomly assigned to having consecutive days worked tracked, as opposed to total days, significantly increases the probability of working. However, conditional on \textit{not} working the day prior, those in the streaks treatment work significantly less. Allowing for flexibility, such as cheat days when effort costs are high, can act as an insurance against breaking streaks, thus mitigating both the motivating and demotivating aspects. We find that the Streaks treatment performs better in terms of payment when individuals do not experience an exogenous cost shock, while the most flexible treatment performs better when there is one. The Cheat Day treatment falls in between, with no difference in payment depending on cost shock. 

Draft forthcoming

Claiming credit for collaborative contributions is an essential part of many hiring and promotion processes. We experimentally test whether people accurately claim how much they contributed in real-effort group tasks and find evidence of systematic overclaiming. We explore factors that could exacerbate or reduce overclaiming such as imperfect memory, the degree of ambiguity , and social pressure. Overclaiming decreases when participants have to discuss respective contributions with teammates prior to making claims.  

Excuse-seeking behavior that facilitates replacing altruistic choices with self-interested ones has been documented in several domains. In a laboratory study, we replicate three leading papers on this topic: Dana et al. (2007), and the use of information avoidance; Exley (2015), and the use of differential risk preferences; and Di Tella et al. (2015),  and the use of motivated beliefs. The replications were conducted as part of a graduate course, attempting to embed one answer to the growing call for experimental replications within the pedagogic process. We fully replicate the simpler Dana et al. paper, and broadly replicate the core findings for the other two projects, though with reduced effect sizes and a failure to replicate on some secondary measures. Finally, we attempt to connect behaviors to facilitate the understanding of how each fit within the broader literature. However, we find no connections across domains.

Using a large observational credit report panel, we show that a substantial subset of financially distressed borrowers who hold a varied debt portfolio avoid defaulting on revolving credit, resulting in an eventual default on their student loans. The severity of student loan default penalties compared to credit card default penalties makes this a suboptimal financial decision that has negative consequences at both the individual and aggregate levels. We explore how the different time horizons of default influence nonpayment decisions using a survey and find that participants rank the timing of default as the most important factor in influencing default decisions. Additionally, we find a higher level of financial literacy for credit cards than for student loans. This paper contributes to the understanding of how impatient behavior can impact financial decisions and consumer well-being.  

This guide provides a detailed account of procedures for conducting traditional in-person laboratory experiments in a “virtual setting.” The main objective of these procedures is to maintain the control of traditional in-person lab studies when conducting studies over the internet. Using the participant pool of the in-person lab the key procedural steps include participants having their webcams on throughout the experiment, technical screenings and attention pledges, playing pre-recorded instructions out loud, upholding clear experimenter roles and communication protocols when interacting with participants, and finally detailed and scripted procedures for managing participants throughout the session. The described procedures have been used for more than 100 sessions and have secured results that are indistinguishable from those from the in-person lab.