4437 W.W. Posvar Hall
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Ph: (412) 648-7266
Fax: (412) 648-7277 |
My
research aims to enrich our understanding of human behavior and
democratic processes. I am interested in a variety of topics, ranging from
voting and elections, to collective choice and decision making
processes, to information and communication. Can voters hold
politicians accountable? Why isn’t the pool of candidates for office
more diverse? Do elections increase the provision of public goods? Are
parties’ reputations tied to what they do in government? How does
competition affect the incentives for lying and do citizens know when
they are being lied to?
The approach I take to answering these questions relies on theoretical,
statistical, and experimental analysis. Formal, analytical models are
useful tools for social scientific inquiry for generating theoretical
insights about incentives and strategic interaction. By closely linking
theoretical models to empirical analysis, I have constructed novel
tests of theories of political parties, congressional behavior, and
lawmaking. Recently, much of my attention has turned to
incentivized small group and decision-making experiments. Such
experiments are powerful tools for observing behavior under tightly
controlled conditions.
My work with Pitt colleague Kris Kanthak on the gender gap in candidate
emergence was funded by the National Science Foundation and has
received best paper awards for women and politics. It has also been
featured several times in the media: in a New York Times' Upshot column, an MSNBC Original, and a Short cartoon summary by Rice political scientist Rick Wilson.
I also lead the NSF-supported Behavioral Models of Politics project
with Dave Siegel at Duke. This project seeks to organize a research
community and promote a dialogue between theorists and empiricists to
expand the range of analytical models used by political scientists and
political economists beyond the standard rational choice, game
theoretic paradigm by incorporating behavioral concepts, bounded
rationality, psychology, and cognition. You can see previous conference programs here: 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017.
In addition to my primary appointment as a
faculty member in the Department of Political Science, I have a
secondary appointment in the Department of Economics and am an
affiliate of the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Laboratory. I also
serve as the Chairperson of the Department of Political Science. I received my
PhD in Political Economics from Stanford University's Graduate School
of Business, and I previously held an appointment at Carnegie Mellon
University. I have also been a Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt
University, Stanford University, and the University of Amsterdam.
You can view my Google Scholar Profile,
my ResearchGate Profile, or my department profile.
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