This award funds research in behavioral economic theory. The first project develops and analyzes a model of teamwork where team members work together to complete costly but socially valuable tasks. In this model, team members have limited ability to remember information they need to complete their tasks. The team must therefore cooperate not just in their actions, but also in building a collective memory. If one member has forgotten key information she needs to complete her part of the job, another team member must step in with a reminder. However, this creates a strategic situation; if I fail to remind my teammate, the team as a whole is less productive, but I will appear to be a strong performer when compared to my co-worker.
The second project develops a framework for examining preferences for objective information. In this model, an economic agent has incomplete information about important conditions that affect the results of a specific decision. The research formalizes the idea of a test as an information structure paired with a collection of probability distributions, conditional on each state of the world, over the events comprising the information structure. The PI and her collaborator build a utility representation in which the decision maker displays selective information seeking when information is used towards resolving a nondegenerate decision problem. Depending on how her objectives conflict in different states of the world, a decision maker may wish to mitigate the difficulty of her decision problem by obscuring her knowledge of the true state or gathering more accurate information.
