I study the psychological, economic, and technological implications of mental resource scarcity: the fact that human mental activity is inherently bounded by our limited capacity to process information. My work develops new theories of how mental resources constraints influence both psychological processes (e.g., curiosity) and economic institutions (e.g., digital platforms). I am especially interested in understanding the effects of artificial intelligence and other information technologies that augment, alter, or displace human mental capacities.
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Working Papers
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Undermining Mental Proof: How AI Can Make Cooperation Harder by Making Thinking Easier
With Simon DeDeo. Forthcoming at Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 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]