I am a PhD student at Yale. I will be on the 2025/26 job market. I am interested in Economic Theory, particularly in Information, Behavioral, and Game Theory.
This paper characterizes convex information costs using an axiomatic approach. We employ mixture convexity and sub-additivity, which capture the idea that producing “balanced” outputs is less costly than producing “extreme” ones. Our analysis leads to a novel class of cost functions that can be expressed in terms of Rényi divergences between signal distributions across states. This representation allows for deviations from the standard posterior-separable cost, thereby accommodating recent experimental evidence. We also characterize two simpler special cases, which can be written as either the maximum or a convex transformation of posterior-separable costs.
We study how non-Bayesian updating affects the evaluation of information, and when it may lead to information avoidance. We propose a measure of value based on anticipatory utility. Under this measure, information can have non-instrumental value. We show that the absence of non-instrumental value characterizes the optimality of perfect information, which in turn is equivalent to additional information being always desirable. We show that overreaction is incompatible with robust desirability of additional information, while underreaction may accommodate it.
We analyze the infinite repetition with imperfect feedback of a simultaneous or sequential game, assuming that players are strategically sophisticated—but impatient—expected-utility maximizers. Sophisticated strategic reasoning in the repeated game is combined with belief updating to provide a foundation for a refinement of self-confirming equilibrium. In particular, we model strategic sophistication as rationality and common strong belief in rationality. Then, we combine belief updating and sophisticated reasoning to provide sufficient conditions for a kind of learning—that is, the ability, in the limit, to exactly forecast the sequence of future observations—thus showing that impatient agents end up playing a sequence of self-confirming equilibria in strongly rationalizable conjectures of the one-period game.
