Scarcity affects behavior not only by changing what people can afford, but also by changing what they attend to. This paper shows that the perception of scarcity alone—the feeling that a resource such as money or time is insufficient relative to one’s needs—can redirect attention and affect productivity, even when objective resources are held fixed. I develop a framework in which agents allocate limited attention across tasks according to their returns to attention and task complexity. Perceived scarcity arises when resources fall below a subjective need threshold, increasing the marginal value of outcomes in the scarce domain and, in turn, the return to attending to it. The model predicts that perceived scarcity increases attention to scarcity-relevant tasks but crowds out attention from other tasks. To separate perceived scarcity from objective scarcity, I test the mechanism in an experiment that induces perceived scarcity while holding participants’ available resources fixed across treatment conditions. The results show that perceived scarcity increases attention to the scarce domain and reduces performance on competing tasks. Overall, losses on neglected tasks exceed gains in the scarce domain.

Presented at: Internal Theory Seminar Caltech (2026),  BSPA Harvard (2026), Krajbich Lab UCLA (2026), EEA-ESEM Dublin (2026), 2nd Berlin PhD Conference (2026), ESA Europe UPF (2026),  Behavioral Economics Spring School UCSD (2026), FUR Alicante (2026), Cognitive Foundations of Decision-Making SS Ghent (2025), Choice and Welfare Queen Mary (2025), Summer Institute in Theory-Based Experiments Caltech (2024), FUR Queensland (2024), Invited Seminar Sydney (2024), SNE (2024), EADM UPF (2022)

We develop a formal framework for analyzing how decision making is informed by the extraction of statistical relationships from data. In our model, distinct datasets are generated by a common causal relationship that maps a relevant subset of predictors into a distribution over outcomes. A decision maker observes a dataset and seeks to extract a decision rule that maps a relevant subset of variables into actions, trading off the rule’s value against its complexity cost. Leveraging the invariance of the underlying causal rule across datasets, we derive novel testable predictions that decouple a rule's value from its cost in predicting the ex-ante probability of extracting the invariant rule, substitution toward other rules, and the emergence of disagreement. We test these predictions and find supporting evidence through our own experiment. We also demonstrate how our framework can be applied to study the role of complexity costs using data from Kendall and Oprea (2024).

Presented at: Annual Conference of the French Association of Experimental Economics (2025)*, Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality at Max Planck Institute Berlin (2023), The 33rd Advanced School in Economic Theory at University of Jerusalem (2023)

*coauthor presentations

Coordination failures are pervasive in economic and social life, yet their behavioral determinants remain difficult to isolate because beliefs, risk attitudes, and other traits often move together. We study these determinants using transcranial static magnetic stimulation (tSMS) over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in two randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind experiments (N=112). Modulating the left DLPFC increased selection of the risky action required for efficient coordination in repeated Stag Hunt games, raising the rate of choosing this action by 16-17 percentage points. The effect was concentrated among participants with pessimistic beliefs about their partner’s future actions, indicating a greater willingness to bear strategic risk. This interpretation is supported by an independent lottery task, in which stimulated participants also became more risk tolerant. By contrast, we do not find evidence that the treatment affected measured reciprocity, patience, or cognitive reflection.

Presented at: Society for Neuroeconomics (Boston) (2025) - POSTER LINK, NeuroPsychoEconomics at University College Dublin (2025), Annual Conference of the French Association of Experimental Economics (2025), Neuroeconomics of Disadvantage Workshop at University of Sydney (2024), Neuroeconomics Summer School at University of Pennsylvania (2023)