Political institutions create networks over which politicians and activists communicate, coordinate, and cooperate. My research focuses on how the shapes of these networks affect the ability of groups to solve collective problems. Together with Mathew McCubbins and Nick Weller at USC, I conduct experiments in which groups of human subjects attempt to solve coordination and cooperation problems embedded in networks of varying structures. My goal is to build a better understanding of how groups solve or fail to solve collective problems in the real world, by providing better models of dynamic, multi-actor strategic interaction over networks.
A second line of work, with Brigitte Zimmerman at UCSD, uses human-subject experiments to measure behavioral traits of political elites. We use a regression-discontinuity design to estimate the effect of holding office on Zambian politicians’ strategic choices. In a methodology paper, we outline three dimensions of subject compliance with experimental treatments, and show how failure to establish compliance on any of these dimensions can invalidate experimental results.
ACADEMIC PAPERS
Can We Think Globally, Act Locally?
Environmental problems frequently require cooperation and coordination to solve. Even if political actors can overcome the conflict between national self-interest and global social welfare, environmental issues typically involve multiple possible solutions, so the various actors need to coordinate on a unified policy solution. In this paper we focus on a neglected aspect of common pool resource problems – whether or not groups of political actors can find a solution to the underlying coordination game. We demonstrate experimentally that when actors possess local information, but their local neighborhoods are relatively isolated, it can be very difficult to achieve coordination. Our results suggest that international organizations and globalization may influence the ability of nations to reach coordinated solutions to environmental problems in two different ways. First, if increased interaction between actors leads to a reduction in the number of solutions to a problem, then coordination may be less likely. Second, if it is possible to build connections between actors without reducing the number of solutions to a coordination problem, then these connections facilitate coordination.
Social network analysis is an increasingly popular tool. However, analysts using this tool often have a different view of the network than do the nodal actors; the analyst has a bird’s-eye view while nodal actors have a bug’s-eye view. The analyst, therefore, must argue one of the following points: either the nodal actors are able to identify the same characteristic that the analyst has identified, or that characteristic affects outcomes without nodal actors being aware of it. We argue that identifying what nodes know about the network would enhance the claims made in many works of social network analysis. We also present experimental evidence that strategic actors are unable to condition their behavior on network structure without extensive information about that network. Our experimental results suggest that observational research should consider both the information environment in which actors make choices and the possible interaction between this environment and the structure of the underlying network.
Does more connectivity help groups to solve social problems?
Recent experimental studies in the social and computer sciences have claimed that higher network connectivity helps individuals solve coordination problems. However, this is not always the case, especially when we consider complex coordination tasks; we demonstrate that networks can have both constraining edges that inhibit collective action and redundant edges that encourage it. We show that the constraints imposed by additional edges can impede coordination even though these edges also increase communication. By contrast, edges that do not impose additional constraints facilitate coordination, as described in previous work. We explain why the negative effect of constraint trumps the positive effect of communication by analyzing coordination games as a special case of widely-studied constraint satisfaction problems.
Published in the Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
NEWSPAPER ARTICLES
After college, I worked for two years in Boston, including as a staff writer and editorial assistant at The Christian Science Monitor. Below are a few of my articles.
Jill Carroll on her captivity in Iraq.
I didn't write this, but I strongly recommend it. Jill’s courage is extraordinary, and her reporting is a revelation into the inner workings of the Iraqi insurgency.
An 'island in the sky' shelters new life. Bruce Beehler, leader of an expedition that discovered 40 new species in the Foja Mountains of New Guinea, describes the area as a natural experiment in evolution.
1,000 days in Iraq. A statistics page for the Monitor Backstory, the section I was hired to help launch.
BERKELEY POLITICAL REVIEW
At Cal I was National Editor of the Berkeley Political Review, a non-partisan quarterly magazine. BPR was a successful startup publication with a broad reach—our work was covered on CNN and in newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and El Universal, and we won awards for our strong political analysis. In addition to editing, I occasionally contributed viewpoint articles. Here are a few in PDF.
Spring 2004 Sacrament vs. Civil Right
Winter 2003 Sweat the Small Stuff
Autumn 2002 Attacking first to keep the peace?
