Here are some links to papers that I’m working on. If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you.

“Betting on Weight Loss … And Losing: Personal Gambles as Commitment Mechanisms”

We investigate an unusual commitment mechanism used to overcome self-control problems: betting on one's ability to lose weight. Our results suggest that successful incentives for weight loss depend as much on the temporal structure of the incentives as on the actual magnitude.

Click on the image to read the paper.

“Information Spillovers Among Resource Extractors”

An unresolved empirical question is the degree to which individual extractors learn from the behavior of other extractors. The question is difficult to resolve because there is always the possibility that an unobserved influence on an individual extractor happens to be correlated with the behavior of other extractors. The difficulty is further compounded by the fact that an unobserved influence on one individual indirectly affects everyone who is influenced by that individual. I propose an identification strategy to overcome these difficulties by focusing on a common feature of the resource extraction process: gold rushes of new entrants. Gold rushes typically consist of individuals who have strong incentives to pay attention to their peer group but who do not themselves influence their peer group. Fueled by an expansionary Japanese economy, the Northern California sea urchin fishery experienced a surge of new entrants in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I use these new entrants to cleanly identify strong information spillovers.

Click on the image to read the paper.

“Income Targeting and the Evolution of a Fishery”

A well-known paper by Colin Camerer and others found evidence that New York city cabdrivers work to achieve a daily income target. We ask the same question using data on fishermen and explore the implications for fisheries management.

Click on the picture to see a poster from the 2007 American Fisheries Society meeting.

“A Field Experiment on Studying and Procrastination”

We investigate the effect of paying students to complete 75 hours of studying at a monitored location over a five-week period.  While our ex ante prediction was that imposing a weekly structure would help procrastinating students avoid getting too far behind, we instead find that a higher proportion of students achieve the 75-hour target in the time-unstructured treatment.  The patterns of study time show a pronounced weekly cycle; remarkably, this pattern is almost identical for both treatments.  While we cannot reject the models of quasi-hyperbolic discounting, these patterns seem more consistent with the notion of willpower. 

Click on the image to read a draft of the paper.