Publications

Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate any…

Research suggests that White women often experience more gender backlash than women of color in response to expressions of agency. We consider whether this differential in backlash is driven by the match or mismatch of the race of both perceivers…

What conditions enable novel intellectual contributions to diffuse and become integrated into later scientific work? Prior work tends to focus on whole cultural products, such as patents and articles, and emphasizes external social factors as…

This paper presents a model in which people sort between two districts based on economic and ideological preferences. People are either ideologues who prefer redistribution over a public good or non-ideologues who prefer a public good that…

We consider a platform facilitating trade between sellers and buyers with the objective of maximizing consumer surplus. Even though in many such marketplaces, prices are set by revenue-maximizing sellers, platforms can influence prices through (i…

Status-based theories of labor market inequality contend that, even when workers have identical qualifications and performance, employers evaluate them differently based on stereotypes about their status group. Gender and parenthood are status…

Shifting attachments to social groups are a constant in the modern era. What accounts for variation in the strength of group identification? Whereas prior work has emphasized group-level properties and individual differences, this article instead…

The Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative surveyed 10,000 employer businesses in 2022 as part of its annual national survey to assess the current state of U.S. Latino entrepreneurship. We have compiled some of the most pressing insights…

The Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative surveyed 10,000 employer businesses in 2022 as part of its annual national survey to assess the current state of U.S. Latino entrepreneurship. We have compiled some of the most pressing insights…

I develop and test a theory that explains why organizations may struggle to adapt in the face of change even when their members are aware of change, are motivated to adapt, and have the resources to do so. I build on complex-systems theory, which…

The Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative surveyed 10,000 employer businesses in 2022 as part of its annual national survey to assess the current state of U.S. Latino entrepreneurship. We have compiled some of the most pressing insights…

Modern large language models generate texts that are virtually indistinguishable from those written by humans and achieve near-human performance in comprehension and reasoning tests. Yet, their complexity makes it difficult to explain and predict…

If explicitly, blatantly dehumanizing a group of people — overtly characterizing them as less than human — facilitates harming them, then reversing this process is paramount. Addressing dehumanization among American political…

The Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative surveyed 10,000 employer businesses in 2022 as part of its annual national survey to assess the current state of U.S. Latino entrepreneurship. We have compiled some of the most pressing insights…

We propose that self-essentialist reasoning is a foundational mechanism of the similarity-attraction effect. Our argument is that similarity breeds attraction in two steps: (a) people categorize someone with a shared attribute as a person like me…

This article probes the relative importance of alignment amongst key stakeholders as one factor in explaining differences in On-The-Field and Off-The-Field performance of professional sporting clubs. Informed by a survey of 130 professional team…

Descriptive norms — the behavior of other individuals in one’s reference group — play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on average behavior.…

How does the self-relevance of a social movement shape individuals’ engagement with it? We examined the decision-making processes that underlie support for Black Lives Matter (BLM) among Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White Americans. We find…