Hi! I am a researcher in Applied Microeconomics focusing on Behavioral Industrial Organization and Cultural/Institutional Economics. I research how social relationships interact with economic institutions.

I joined the University of Leicester’s Business School starting September 2023.

You can reach me at pis2@leicester.ac.uk.

Sign up for office hours here or drop by on Tuesday, 3-5 PM at Mary Seacole 007.

You can find my CV here.

Working papers

The Effect of Social Relationships on Market Efficiency

Abstract This paper investigates the impact of social relationships on imperfectly competitive markets. I model social relationships as linear directed altruism in markets with substitutes and complements. The model generates testable predictions, the most important of which being that social relationships among sellers of substitutes increase prices and reduce efficiency. In contrast, social relationships among sellers of complements reduce prices and increase efficiency. I test these predictions in a controlled laboratory network structure among market participants, drawing on real-world friendships. The results confirm the model's key insights. Additional treatments explore the robustness of these findings and the underlying mechanisms. Overall, the results suggest that economists can analyze social relationships in imperfectly competitive markets similarly to how they evaluate other forms of profit internalization, such as common ownership and mergers.


Managing Bidder Learning in Retail Auctions (with Simon Schulten)

Abstract When firms exploit behavioral biases it is natural to think that, eventually, consumers will learn to avoid their mistakes, which limits exploitation. Profit maximizing firms, however, have an incentive to undermine such learning. We study these learning dynamics in a multi-unit descending price auction setting with a simultaneous fixed price offer. We analyze 8 million bids from over 280,000 unique bidders in retail auctions. Consumers frequently bid more than the fixed price offered by the same seller. Depending on rival bidders' actions, those overbids sometimes lead to paying more than the fixed price (overpaying). We argue overpaying increases saliency of the consumers’ mistake by making it payoff relevant and thereby may affect consumer learning. Indeed, bidders who overpaid subsequently overbid less often and are more likely to refrain from submitting a bid compared to bidders who overbid but did not overpay. Methodologically, we discuss identification of our treatment effects using causal graphs and show how these treatment effects identify a three-type structural model of bidder behavior with learning dynamics.


Norm Prevalence and Interdependence: Evidence from a Large-Scale Historical Survey of German speaking Villages (with Radost Holler)

Abstract We use large-scale survey data of German speaking villages from the 1930's to investigate drivers of cooperation, gender, and religious norms. Through geographic cluster analysis, we show that inter-regional variation explains only little heterogeneity in norms. Villages in the same physical and institutional environment still maintain different norms. We argue that local differences in the structure of social relationships can explain intra-regional heterogeneity in norms. We focus on a community's ability to transmit and enforce norms to derive theoretical links between correlates of community social relationships and the number of norms it maintains (norm prevalence). Empirically we find that: (1) norm prevalence is positively related to three correlates of community social relationships: religiously homogeneous villages, villages that border on other villages with a different majority religion, and villages with more within-village social gatherings; (2) villages with stronger community-level social relationships are also less likely to segment their reference group for the cooperation norm to smaller social units; (3) cooperation norms make other norms more likely.