Zachary Wojtowicz

(why-toe-vitch)



Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Economics & HBS

Ph.D. in Behavioral Economics &

M.A. in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University

[cv]           [scholar]           [email]

I study the foundations of beliefs, preferences, and decisions. My work applies economic methods to psychological resources (especially attention) with the aim of generating novel insights into both individual minds and the institutions that bring them together: markets, organizations, and digital platforms. I am particularly interested in theory that deepens our understanding of artificial intelligence and other technologies that augment, alter, or displace human mental effort.

I'm currently on the job market.

Job Market Paper

Context and Communication [link] 

Working Papers

Model Diversity and Dynamic Belief Formation [link]



Push and Pull: A Framework for Measuring Attentional Agency

With Shrey Jain and Nicholas Vincent. [link]



Boredom and Flow: An Opportunity Cost Theory of Motivational Attention

With Nick Chater and George Loewenstein. [link]

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Undermining Mental Proof: How AI Can Make Cooperation Harder by Making Thinking Easier

With Simon DeDeo. Forthcoming at AAAI, 2025. [link]


The Economics of Attention

With George Loewenstein. Forthcoming at The Journal of Economic Literature, 2025. [link]



When and Why is Persuasion Hard? A Computational Complexity Result 

Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society, 2024. [link]


Cognition: A Study in Mental Economy

With George Loewenstein. Cognitive Science, 2023. [link]



The Motivational Processes of Sense-Making

With Nick Chater and George Loewenstein. In Schultz, Eric, Cogliati-Dezza, Irene, & Wu, Charley (eds.) The Drive for Knowledge, 2022. [link]



Curiosity and the Economics of Attention

With George Loewenstein. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 2020. [link]



From Probability to Consilience: How Explanatory Values Implement Bayesian Reasoning

With Simon DeDeo. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2020. [link]



Modeling Online Discourse With Coupled Distributed Topics

With Nikita Srivatsan and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2018. [link]

Other Research

Further Analysis of Corporoate Bond Market Liquidity

With Tobias Adrian, Michael Flemming, and Erik Vogt. Liberty Street Economics, 2016. [link]



Corporate Bond Market Liquidity Redux: More Price-Based Evidence

With Tobias Adrian, Michael Flemming, and Erik Vogt. Liberty Street Economics, 2016. [link]



Did Third Avenue's Liquidation Reduce Corporate Bond Market Liquidity?

With Tobias Adrian, Michael Flemming, and Erik Vogt. Liberty Street Economics, 2016. [link]



Apparatus for Sealing Slide Bottom

World Patent No. Wo2010077975 A1, 2010. [link]