Welcome to my research page!

Papers

Published Papers

• Cursed Sequential Equilibrium (with Po-Hsuan Lin and Thomas R. Palfrey)
  
  American Economic Review, 2025 [Earlier Working Paper Versions (arXiv)]
  Abstract

  
  
  

  This paper develops a framework to extend the strategic form analysis of cursed equilibrium (CE) developed by Eyster and Rabin (2005) to multistage games. The approach uses behavioral strategies rather than normal form mixed strategies and imposes sequential rationality. We define and characterize properties of cursed sequential equilibrium (CSE) and apply it to four canonical economic applications: signaling games, reputation building, durable goods monopoly, and the dirty faces game. These applications illustrate various implications of CSE, show how and why it differs from sequential equilibrium and CE, and provide evidence from laboratory experiments that support the empirical relevance of CSE.

  
  

• Measuring Higher-Order Rationality with Belief Control (with Wei James Chen and Po-Hsuan Lin)
  
  Experimental Economics, 2025 [Poster] [Experimental Instructions]
  Abstract

  
  
  

  Determining an individual’s strategic reasoning capability based solely on choice data is a complex task. This complexity arises because sophisticated players might have non-equilibrium beliefs about others, leading to non-equilibrium actions. In our study, we pair human participants with computer players known to be fully rational. This use of robot players allows us to disentangle limited reasoning capacity from belief formation and social biases. Our results show that, when paired with robots, subjects consistently demonstrate higher levels of rationality, compared to when paired with human players. Furthermore, players’ rationality levels are relatively stable across games when paired with robot players, even though those with intermediate rationality levels exhibit inconsistency across games. Leveraging our experimental design, we identify and document potential causes of this inconsistency.

  
  

• Extreme (and Non-Extreme) Punishments in Sender-Receiver Games with Judicial Error: An Experimental Investigation (with Joseph Tao-yi Wang)
  
  Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 2023
  Abstract

  
  
  

  In many real world situations, decision-makers have the opportunity to punish informed senders for their biased recommendations, while lie-detection is far from perfect. Hence, we conduct an experiment which incorporates ex post punishment and monitoring uncertainty into the discrete sender-receiver game first introduced by Crawford and Sobel, where a knowledgeable sender sends a cheap-talk message to a receiver who determines a policy action. After taking this action, the receiver observes a noisy signal of the true state and can impose a costly punishment on the sender. We vary the strength of punishment from mild (nominal), strong (deterrent) to extreme (potential of losing everything), and vary receiver's signal uncertainty when punishment is extreme. We find that receivers punish less as the strength of punishment increases, which suggests people care more about wrongly punishing innocent senders harsher than not being able to hand liars harsher punishments they deserve. More importantly, the opportunity of punishment encourages receivers to follow senders more and thus improves overall information transmission and utilization, even though senders need not exaggerate less.

Working Papers

• A Comparison of Cursed Sequential Equilibrium and Sequential Cursed Equilibrium: Different Concepts of Cursedness in Dynamic Games (with Po-Hsuan Lin and Thomas R. Palfrey)
  
  arXiv:2304.05515v2, Updated 21 Mar 2026
  Abstract

  
  
  

  Cursed Equilibrium of Eyster and Rabin (2005) has been a leading theory for explaining winner's-curse-type behavior in static Bayesian games, but it faces conceptual limitations when applied to dynamic games. Two recent extensions, Cursed Sequential Equilibrium (CSE) by Fong, Lin and Palfrey (2025) and Sequential Cursed Equilibrium (SCE) by Cohen and Li (2026), address these limitations in fundamentally different ways. Complementing these two papers, this paper provides a systematic comparison of CSE and SCE, clarifying their conceptual foundations and technical implications, including their notions of cursedness, belief updating, and treatment of public histories.

Work in Progress

• An Experiment on Threshold Public Goods Game with Communication under Unanimity Rule (with Po-Hsuan Lin and Thomas R. Palfrey)
  
  Draft coming soon.
  Abstract

  
  
  

  This paper theoretically and experimentally studies a threshold public goods game with communication, in which each player decides whether to contribute based on a private cost and can send a non-binding binary message before making their contribution decision. The public good is provided only if all players contribute. We find theoretically that cursedness---the tendency to neglect other players’ private information and actions---can reduce the informativeness of messages and, consequently, public good provision. Moreover, the effect of cursedness is sensitive to group size and to the support of the distribution of private costs. We experimentally manipulate group size (two or three players) and the support of the distribution of private costs, and find that the disequilibrium behavior is qualitatively consistent with the predictions of cursedness. However, public goods provision remains at the efficient level because the emergence of altruistic behavior offsets the inefficiency caused by cursedness.