I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science
and a graduate fellow in the
Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy
at Washington University in St. Louis.
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science
and a graduate fellow in the
Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy
at Washington University in St. Louis.
Before graduate school I was a sailor, a network administrator and programmer, a mathematician, and a teacher.
My research interests reflect this breadth of experience with broad substantive and methodological interests. I study U.S. national institutions with formal and computational models, Bayesian statistics, and laboratory experiments. In particular, I study how incentives affect the flow of information in bureaucratic institutions and I develop tools used to form and test formal models of institutions.
My dissertation addresses the question "Why do bureaucrats work so hard?" Bureaucrats put in higher effort and comply more with the wishes of Congress and the president than predicted by principal-agent theory. Bargaining games such as the ultimatum and principal-agent games are commonly applied in describing political interactions such as negotiations between Congress and the president or congressional oversight of the bureaucracy. Analysts typically assume that actors know perfectly each other's payoffs or that there is some constant private information about payoffs about which one can learn over the course of play. However, real bargaining involves uncertainty about players' own payoffs and often this uncertainty cannot be reduced during the game through learning. Accounting for this uncertainty provides a richer theoretical model, more reasonable behavioral predictions, and solves the statistical "zero-likelihood" problem, allowing direct statistical comparison of competing substantive explanations for bureaucrats' higher than expected effort and compliance. My dissertation explores two strategic random utility models of the ultimatum game -- like QRE, but with continuous action spaces. I use a lab experiment to determine which of the two provides a better understanding of how uncertainty enters into bargaining, and then show why a similar approach will not work when extending QRE to principal-agent theory.
Other current projects include a formal model of the network of Supreme Court citations based on the empirical work by Fowler et al. (2007) and an exploration of the dimensionality manifest in roll call data from the Russian Duma and the US Congress. Previous projects relate to experimental tests of strategic voting on the Supreme Court, gauging the influence of public employment on revenue-generating referenda, designing and writing a test suite for MCMCpack, and an experimental test of a model of democratic peace theory.
After completing my Ph.D. (expected in 2009) I will be an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis.
In addition to my studies I am the administrator of several Web sites, including that of the Society for Political Methodology, the Crash Course in LaTeX, and my family.
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