Research

I am a mathematical social scientist working in the intersection of economics, social work and computer science. My research focuses on the behavioral “supply chain” of public/social service provision: determinants of voluntary contributions, design of mechanisms, and models of behavior of the very low income.

CV.


SOCIAL PREFERENCES

Economics and political science experiments on various forms of prosocial behavior in the field and lab.

ECON + SOCIAL WORK

Field experiments and surveys with the working homeless, former inmates, and minimum wage workers in the United States.

ECON + CS
Design of mechanisms for practical use.

  • Improving Citizen-initiated Police Reform Efforts through Interactive Design: A Case Study in Allegheny County with Yongsu Ahn, Eliana Beigel, Noah Braun, Collin Griffin, Blair Mickles, Emmaline Rial, Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.

    Our project aims to provide citizens and community organizers with a better understanding of the legal landscape of police accountability in Allegheny County, allowing them to more effectively advocate for reform. We overcome data inaccessibility, data complexity, and the fragmentation of data across municipalities by creating an open collaborative network with community leaders, gathering contracts and other data on over 100 police departments in Allegheny County, and creating a web platform to navigate them.
  • Project 412Connect: Bridging Students and Marginalized Communities, with Michael Hamilton, Alex DiChristofano, and Mara McCloud, Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 5, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3465416.3483304

    We investigate the challenges Black-owned businesses face in the United States and design and implement a platform, 412Connect (https://www.412connect.org/), to increase online support for Pittsburgh Black-owned businesses from students in the Pittsburgh university community. The site operates by coordinating interactions between student users and participating businesses via targeted recommendations.
  • Accounting for Noise in the Microfoundation of Information Aggregation, Games and Economic Behavior (2017), 101, pp. 334-353

    I develop a computational method to rank a set of information structures on how “incomplete” aggregation will be. Aggregation in information structures that requires human subjects to be very precise/noiseless are ex-ante predicted to be poor.
  • Prediction Markets: Alternative Mechanisms for Complex Environments with Few Traders with PJ Healy, Richard Lowery, and John Ledyard. Management Science (2010), 56 (11), pp. 1977-1996.

    When information is complex, information aggregation is incomplete. Non-market mechanisms outperforms the double auction.
  • Mobile Communication Surrounding Political Violence in Cote d’Ivoire with Daniel Berger and Shankar Kalyanaraman

    With data from Orange Telecom and the United Nations peacekeeping operations in Côte d’Ivoire, we show that mobile phone usage data may be aggregating signals about incipient political violence. Comparisons of mobile patterns preceeding festivals and sporting events are included.
  • Ongoing studies: