"Attention Allocation under Scarcity: Theory and Evidence"
Scarcity directly affects behavior by limiting what is feasible. Less understood are the behavioral effects of perceiving a resource—such as money, time, or capacity—as scarce. I develop a framework in which agents allocate limited attention across tasks as a function of task payoffs and complexity. Perceived scarcity is represented by a kinked utility around a subjective need threshold, so that falling short of this threshold raises the value of attending to the scarce domain. The model predicts that perceived scarcity reallocates attention toward scarcity-relevant tasks, improving performance there while generating negative spillovers on other tasks. These spillovers are stronger when competing tasks are more complex. A key identification challenge is that perceptions of scarcity are tightly linked to objective resource constraints. To address this, I introduce an experiment that induces perceived scarcity while holding objective resources fixed. The results show increased attention toward the scarce domain and reduced performance on competing tasks, with losses on these other tasks outweighing gains in the scarce domain.
Presented at:
Behavioral Economics Spring School at UC San Diego (2026)
Cognitive Foundations of Decision-Making Summer School at Ghent University (2025)
Choice and Welfare: Beyond the Rational Agent at Queen Mary University of London (2025)
Summer Institute in Theory-Based Experiments at Caltech (2024)
The Foundations of Utility and Risk (FUR) at University of Queensland (2024)
Invited Seminar at University of Sydney (2024)
Society for Neuroeconomics (SNE - Cascais) (2024)
European Association for Decision Making at UPF (2022)
"Rewiring Risk: Improving Coordination with Brain Stimulation" (with J. Apesteguia, E. Díez-Rodríguez, A. Oliviero, V. Soto-León)
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 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 coordination by 17% in our main experiment. The effect was concentrated among participants with pessimistic beliefs about their partner’s future actions, indicating a greater willingness to bear strategic risk rather than more optimistic expectations. 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 (SNE - Boston) (2025) - POSTER LINK
NeuroPsychoEconomics at University College Dublin (2025)
Annual Conference of the French Association of Experimental Economics (ASFEE) (2025)
Neuroeconomics of Disadvantage Workshop at University of Sydney (2024)
Neuroeconomics Summer School at University of Pennsylvania (2023)
"Causal Discovery and the Structure of the Learning Environment" (with A. Salvanti)
We develop a formal framework for analyzing how decision making is informed by the extraction of statistical relationships from data. In our framework, different datasets are linked by an invariant statistical causal relationship that maps a relevant subset of predictors to 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 value against an attention-based cost arising from a bottom-up attentional channel. Exploiting the fact that all datasets are consistent with the same invariant rule, we derive novel, domain-general, and testable comparative statics that decouple the role of the relative value of rules from their rule-specific costs in predicting both the ex-ante probability of extracting the invariant rule and the emergence of disagreement. We test these theoretical predictions using experimental data from Kendall and Oprea (2024) and our own experiment.
Presented at:
Annual Conference of the French Association of Experimental Economics (ASFEE) (2025) - coauthor
Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality at Max Planck Institute Berlin (2023)
The 33rd Advanced School in Economic Theory at University of Jerusalem (2023)
Pre-doctoral research
"Gender Gap and Retirement Decisions: the Maternity Pension Supplement in Spain" (with A. Salvanti, C. Tris, H. Guias, J. Ferrando)
Covered in BSE Voice