Attention Allocation under Scarcity: Theory and Evidence
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 affect decisions and productivity by changing the allocation of attention. I develop a framework in which agents allocate limited attention across tasks as a function of task payoffs and complexity. Perceived scarcity is modeled as a kink in utility at a subjective need threshold: falling below this threshold is especially costly, which raises the return to attending to the scarce domain. The model predicts that perceived scarcity increases attention to scarcity-relevant tasks and can improve performance there, but crowds out attention from other tasks. These negative spillovers are stronger when the scarcity-relevant task is more complex. 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 at Caltech (2026), BSPA at Harvard (2026), Krajbich Lab at UCLA (2026), Behavioral Economics Spring School at UCSD (2026), FUR at Alicante ('26), Cognitive Foundations of Decision-Making Summer School at Ghent (2025), Choice and Welfare at Queen Mary (2025), Summer Institute in Theory-Based Experiments at Caltech (2024), FUR at Queensland (2024), Invited Seminar at Sydney (2024), Society for Neuroeconomics (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 (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. 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)
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