Publications

Interacting Mental Models

In Progress. We experimentally study how people revise their perceived causal models in settings where they interact with others. We consider a setting where individuals first form mental models in isolation based on observational data. We then examine when and how exposure to others’ predictions—cast by people who may have extracted differing mental models—influences the model-updating process.
Valeria Burdea, Benjamin Bushong, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch

Disagreement, Information, and Trade

In Progress. We study the relationship between trade and private information in models with heterogeneous priors, and we establish a series of results showing that trade flows in the direction of disagreements and not the direction of private information.
Erik Eyster, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin

Define Obvious: Simplicity in English Auctions

In Progress. In an experiment, we examine the degree to which people use the dominant strategy in an English auction with independent private values. We consider minor changes to the standard auction format where competing measures of complexity disagree on the simplicity of the resulting mechanisms, allowing us to test the extent to which these measures align with observed behavior.
David J. Cooper, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch

Errors in Information Acquisition

In Progress. We experimentally study how people acquire information in a sequential search problem and examine the degree to which their demand for information deviates from the rational benchmark.
Benjamin Bushong, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch

Taste Projection in Bilateral Trade

In Progress. We analyze how taste projection affects bilateral trade under asymmetric information.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Marco Pagnozzi, Antonio Rosato

Quality is in the Eye of the Beholder: Taste Projection in Markets with Observational Learning

American Economic Review, 2024, 114(11): 3746–3787.
We study how misperceptions of others’ tastes influence beliefs, demand, and prices in a market with observational learning.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Antonio Rosato
PDF Online Appendix

Inference from Biased Polls

Games and Economic Behavior, 2024, 148: 449–486.
We examine whether people account for socially desirable responding (SDR) when drawing inferences from poll data.
Andy Brownback, Nathaniel Burke, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch
PDF

The Person or the Situation? Projection Bias and Inference about Others

In Progress. Using a simple experiment, we explore whether projection bias leads to errors in inferences about others’ overall productivity and personality characteristics.
Benjamin Bushong, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Jeongbin Kim

Channeled Attention and Stable Errors

Revise and Resubmit at Quarterly Journal of Economics.
We develop a framework for assessing when somebody will eventually notice that she has a misspecified model of the world, premised on the idea that she neglects information that she deems—through the lens of her misconceptions—to be irrelevant.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin, Joshua Schwartzstein
PDF Previous Version

Heterogeneous Tastes and Social (Mis)Learning

Revise and Resubmit at American Economic Journal: Microeconomics.
We experimentally examine how people learn from others’ actions when those people may have differing tastes.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Benjamin Bushong
PDF Online Appendix

Failures in Forecasting: An Experiment on Interpersonal Projection Bias

Management Science, 2024, 70(12): 8735–8752.
Using a real-effort experiment, we show that people project their current tastes onto others, even when others’ tastes are exogenously manipulated and transparently different.
Benjamin Bushong, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch
PDF Online Appendix

Reference Dependence and Attribution Bias: Evidence from Real-Effort Experiments

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2023, 15(2): 271–308.
We demonstrate that people’s impressions of a real-effort task are shaped by the elation or disappointment they felt when first working on the task.
Benjamin Bushong, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch
PDF Online Appendix

Learning with Misattribution of Reference Dependence

Journal of Economic Theory, 2022, 203, 105473.
We examine errors in learning that arise when an agent who suffers attribution bias fails to account for her reference-dependent utility.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Benjamin Bushong
PDF Working Version

Naive Social Learning, Mislearning, and Unlearning

We study social learning in several natural, yet under-explored, environments among people who naively think each predecessor’s action reflects solely that person’s private information.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin
PDF

Projection of Private Values in Auctions

American Economic Review, 2021, 111(10): 3256–3298.
We explore how taste projection—the tendency to overestimate how similar others’ tastes are to one’s own—affects bidding in auctions.
Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Marco Pagnozzi, Antonio Rosato
PDF Online Appendix

Taste Projection in Models of Social Learning

This paper studies the implications of taste projection—the tendency to overestimate how similar others’ preferences are to our own—within social-learning environments. Note: Several ideas in this paper have been subsumed by `Quality is in the Eye of the Beholder: Taste Projection in Markets with Social Learning’ (AER, 2024). A new version is in progress that emphasizes how even small degrees of bias can lead to learning failures.
PDF