Zachary Wojtowicz


Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Economics & HBS

Ph.D. in Behavioral Economics &

M.A. in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University

[cv]           [scholar]           [email]

I am a behavioral economist who studies the cognitive processes that underlie preferences, beliefs, communication, and coordination. My work applies economic methods to mental resources (especially attention) with the aim of generating novel insights into both minds and markets. I am especially interested in theory that deepens our understanding of artificial intelligence, social media, and other emerging technologies. If you find this approach intriguing and want to chat, drop me a line!

Current Research

Context and Communication [link]


The Economics of Attention

With George Loewenstein. Revise and Resubmit at The Journal of Economic Literature. [link]



Boredom and Flow: An Opportunity Cost Theory of Motivational Attention

With Nick Chater and George Loewenstein. [link]



Limited Attention and Bounded Inference [link]


Peer-Reviewed Publications

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. 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]