I explain puzzles in the school assignment literature using a many-to-one matching model in which participants on one side of the market, the students, are endowed with ego-utilities à la Köszegi (2006). Ego concerns generate a form of information avoidance that results in non-truthful participation in DA matching mechanisms. In particular, students’ best replies may be non-monotonic in school ranks. Furthermore, students may be sensitive to signal garbling, in the sense of Blackwell (1953), even when keeping admission probabilities constant. In terms of policy, the results imply that admissions committees’ reliance on application dimensions that are seemingly weak proxies of academic performance may be beneficial. Other implications relate to the effectiveness of affirmative action policies that directly lower admission requirements: whenever students’ best replies exhibit non-monotonicity in schools’ selectivity, such policies might backfire.

I study partisan gerrymandering when district composition affects candidates' policy positions and, consequently, voters' behavior. In the U.S., primary elections determine which candidates compete in general elections, with a district's ideological composition shaping who emerges as the nominee. Thus, redistricting affects not only which party wins but also the ideology of competing candidates. I find that classical gerrymandering strategies can backfire when candidates emerge endogenously, particularly in districts where extreme voters may select non-viable candidates. However, when properly designed to account for both voter affiliation and preference intensity, gerrymandering can be a more powerful instrument than traditional approaches that consider only party affiliation. I show how methods from optimal transport theory can be used to characterize the optimal redistricting plan, which creates districts that maximize ideological distance between competing candidates. Using these findings, I analyze two implications for the U.S. House of Representatives: how gerrymandering contributes to political polarization and its consequences for minority representation.

We show experimentally that people undervalue options they find complex. We document this phenomenon for tasks as diverse as belief updating, visual perception, and compound risk. This behavior is incompatible with expected utility, even when accounting for risk aversion and incorrect beliefs; instead, it suggests people dislike the cognitive uncertainty they experience in the face of complexity as a form of ambiguity aversion. The data supports this explanation: our effects vary with both cognitive uncertainty, ambiguity aversion, and their interaction. At a broad level, our results suggest that individual preferences (attitudes toward complexity) matter in cognitive models. At a narrower level, our paper informs the literature on non-Bayesian updating, which overlooks complexity aversion, and the connection between compound lottery and ambiguity aversion, which, we show, holds mostly for subjects who find compound lotteries complex.

How do career concerns affect decision-making of public officials? In this paper, we study this problem in the context of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). This setup is challenging for two reasons. On the one hand, the conflicting allure of market opportunities and political advancement presents a tradeoff for committee members between signaling competence and alignment to their political principal. On the other hand, the collective decision-making setup implies that the actions of other members provide information to each Principal, and affect the signaling value of the actions of each member. As a result, conflicting mandates from different political principals can affect the equilibrium behavior of all members. To tackle this problem, we combine a structural approach with an unanticipated change in the information available to the public about internal committee deliberations. We use internal deliberation transcripts from 1970 to 2008 to (i) estimate the value that FOMC members give to market and political reputation, (ii) quantify the probability of correct recommendations in the Transparent and Opaque regimes, and (iii) assess the performance of the FOMC under committee compositions not observed in the data.