"Attention Allocation under Scarcity: Theory & Experiment"
This paper studies the economic consequences of perceived scarcity. I develop a model in which agents optimally allocate limited attention across concurrent tasks as a function of task payoffs and complexity. In the model, perceived scarcity, captured by a kinked utility around a subjective need threshold, distorts attention allocation, generating canonical scarcity effects such as bandwidth tax, trade-off thinking, and tunneling as equilibrium outcomes of rational behavior. The framework yields new testable predictions: perceived scarcity improves performance in the scarce domain, reduces productivity in other tasks, and amplifies cross-task spillovers when task complexity increases. To test these mechanisms, I introduce a novel experimental design that induces perceived scarcity while holding objective resources and incentives fixed. Preliminary evidence shows that the manipulation successfully generates perceived scarcity and produces behavioral patterns consistent with the model’s predictions.
Presented at:
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 problems are widespread in economic and social interactions, where individuals must align actions to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Evidence from multiple lab experiments shows that players often fail to coordinate, even after multiple rounds together. To explore the drivers of these coordination failures, we use a novel non-invasive brain stimulation technique (tSMS) on the left DLPFC to modulate idiosyncratic traits. Our findings, based on two double-blinded randomized sham controlled experiments, demonstrate that stimulating the left DLPFC increased risk attitudes in both lottery choices and coordination games, leading to higher coordination rates. We ruled out alternative mechanisms, such as patience, reciprocity, and beliefs, providing causal evidence on the importance of risk attitudes to achieve efficient coordination.
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