I’m a dissertator in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I’m an economic theorist interested in information economics and decision theory. My current research focuses primarily on valuation of and demand for information, with a secondary interest in experiment design.
Pronouns: he/him
PhD, Economics, 2022 (expected)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
MS, Economics, 2017
University of Wisconsin-Madison
BA, Economics/Mathematics, 2014
New College of Florida
My most recent course: Economics 330 - Money and Banking (course page)
Past Courses
In the past, I’ve been a TA for the following courses:
My past course materials can be found here.
Teaching Portfolio
You can find a portfolio including my teaching philosophy, selected evaluations, and student comments here (Last updated: January 2022).
My job market paper examines a scenario where a decision-maker trying to learn about an underlying state of the world must decide not only how much information to purchase, but also from which sources. I develop an approximate consumer theory for information, valid when information purchases are large and the relevant probabilities are well-described by large-deviations theory. I show that demand for information behaves as though preferences were kinked, and thus is poorly described by the benchmark smooth, convex preference model.
In this project, we generalize some of the results from my job market paper to a Bayesian estimation setting and consider implications for optimal experiment design. We show that the optimal design at large samples generally maximizes the Fisher information per dollar for the worst-case true value of the parameter of interest.
Optimal fast experimentation, with Lones Smith
Bargaining with multiple buyers: evidence from eBay
Like most grad students entering the job market this year, I’ve had to wrestle with the transition to giving talks remotely. Personally, I have some trouble focusing on virtual seminars since the format tends to be fairly static: mostly still slides with perhaps a camera window to the side. To avoid this, I’ve spent a fair amount of time (read: procrastinating) trying to put together a setup that allows me to move around and interact with my materials a bit more. Here, I outline an approach that’s worked reasonably well for me.
I’ve been actively birding since mid-2019.
Occasionally I post some photos to my eBird
Profile and my
Instagram.
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