My research focuses on human decision making in both individual and strategic contexts. I bring together normative models of choice (i.e. conceptualizing people as perfectly rational agents who optimize expectations) and contrast this with descriptive models of decision making (i.e. psychologically realistic models of people who are boundedly rational and heterogeneous). I use an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together methods from experimental economics, cognitive psychology, and mathematical modeling in an effort to gain insights into how humans make decisions, reason, and learn in stochastic and strategic environments.
In one line of research I study the dynamics of trust based cooperation among interdependent decision makers. This work examines various mechanisms that stave off the unraveling of trust and facilitate cooperation between people. In another line of work, I study how decision makers adapt and make trade-offs when making sequential choices among alternatives in a risky and dynamic environment. Two recent projects focus on real options and studies of sequential investments given noisy environments.
