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 am a behavioral scientist who focuses on the social and economic implications of bounded rationality. My work seeks to understand how cognitive constraints impact individual decision making and, in turn, shape the structure of markets, firms, and digital platforms. I apply these insights to study the implications of artificial intelligence and other emerging digital technologies.

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 on Digital Platforms

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

The Economics of Attention

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



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

With Simon DeDeo. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 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]