How it started

I started thinking seriously about this project around 2018, partly because I have a personal fondness for surprises. After going on a surprise holiday myself, I became curious about who actively chooses these experiences and why.

What I learned

The project became a way to understand both a broader behavioral pattern and, to some extent, my own preferences. It asks how people value surprise and how that fits with standard ideas such as stochastic dominance.

How it started

This project began in 2014 and was my first real attempt to move from lab experiments into a field setting. The idea came from an email from NYU wellness services advertising a weight loss challenge, which immediately struck me as a natural subject pool for studying temptation and self-control outside the lab.

What I learned

The project was both challenging and enjoyable. It was my first field experiment, and it shaped how I think about bringing behavioral mechanisms into more realistic environments.

How it started

This project originated around 2012 and eventually became my job market paper when I went on the market from NYU in 2016. The hardest part was not the theory but finding a convincing and tractable form of temptation that could work in a controlled experiment.

Early on, I tried using video games, especially Angry Birds, as the tempting activity. That meant many hours in the lab playing the game to calibrate the design, which did not always look like serious research from the outside, but the trial and error was essential.

Submission journey

QJE DR → Econometrica R&R → Accepted

What I learned

This project taught me how much careful experimental design depends on patient iteration. What looked unproductive at times was exactly what made the final design work.

How it started

This was my first, and so far only, theory project. The starting intuition was that people may prefer flexibility when they are uncertain about their preferences, but prefer commitment when they are certain, especially in the presence of temptation.

Working with Leonardo Pejsachowicz, I learned that this intuition does not go through in any straightforward way. The paper ultimately became an impossibility result showing that the desired coexistence cannot be achieved under the proposed framework.

Submission journey

Econometrica Reject → RES Reject → JET Accepted

What I learned

The paper also had an instructive review path. In our first Econometrica submission, we used a long proof that relied on a rather unattractive axiom; one reviewer pointed out the axiom was unnecessary and sketched a much shorter proof. It was a vivid lesson in how peer review can materially improve theoretical work.

How it started

This was my first laboratory experiment and, more broadly, my first experiment of any kind. It grew out of my master's thesis work on trust, and I approached it with a great deal of confidence: I had NSF funding, a theoretical framework, and enough optimism to label the dataset "awesome data" before collecting it.

Submission journey

GEB Reject › MS DR › JEEA DR › Economic Journal Reject › AEJ Micro DR › European Economic Review Reject › JEBO cond. accepted

What I learned

Data collection quickly reminded me that subjects do not behave like the cleanest version of a model. At one point a participant even fell asleep at the computer, which was an early and durable lesson that experiments are always messier in practice than on paper.

Origin

This project began with a small team and expanded over time, bringing together researchers with quite different views on pre-registration. That heterogeneity turned out to be part of the story, not just background.

What I learned

There was a certain irony in writing a paper about pre-registration, pre-registering our own analysis, and then encountering cases where deviations became necessary. Even within the team, there was not always agreement on how those deviations should be interpreted or presented, which mirrored one of the paper's central themes.

How it started

This project began in 2020, during the COVID-19 period, with the goal of improving the peer review experience for both authors and reviewers. We wanted to think seriously about both the demand side and the supply side of the system.

Submission journey

PNAS DR → Science DR → Nature Human Behaviour DR → JESA R&R → Accepted

What I learned

The project was demanding from start to finish. Even fielding a survey on peer review practices proved slower and harder than expected, and the paper's own review process was challenging in exactly the way that made the motivation for the project feel even more real.

Why I wrote this

I wanted to show what the publication process really looks like. Six rejections sounds rough, but it's actually pretty normal. Most researchers don't talk about this publicly.