Contact Information
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 872-985-4140
maria.betto@u.northwestern.edu
[Click here for my personal website]
Education
Ph.D., Economics, Northwestern University, 2024 (expected)
MA, Economics, Northwestern University, 2018
MS, Business Economics, Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV), 2017
BA, Economic Sciences, Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV), 2014.
Primary Fields of Specialization
Microeconomic Theory
Curriculum Vitae
Research
“Cognition in Preferences and Choice”
This paper centers on the role of cognition in the refinement of preferences and choices. As cognition increases, choices become more selective, resulting in narrower sets of preferred options and finer rankings. Conversely, lower cognition levels lead to coarser rankings with wider choice sets. To characterize this behavior, I extend the classical rational-choice framework by introducing a modified version of the Weak Axiom, denoted Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference Difficulty (WARPD). I show that WARPD is equivalent to an interval-valued utility functional representation, where the size of the interval decreases monotonically with cognition. I also demonstrate that WARPD is equivalent to a fuzzy rationalizability concept, implying that cognition-dependent choices satisfying WARPD can be represented by a complete and transitive fuzzy binary relation. The paper also explores applications, highlighting how consumers’ choice coarseness influences firms’ strategic pricing decisions in different competitive settings.
“All-Pay Auctions with Spillovers” [Paper]
with Matthew Thomas (TE, forthcoming)
When opposing parties compete for a prize, the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner’s reward. These spillovers can have substantial influence on the equilibrium behavior of participants in applications such as lobbying, warfare, labor tournaments, marketing, and R&D races. To understand this influence, we study a general class of asymmetric, two-player all-pay contests where we allow for spillovers in each player’s reward. The link between participants’ efforts and rewards yields novel effects. In particular, players with higher costs and lower values than their opponent sometimes extract larger payoffs.
“Choice over Assessments” [Slides]
with Matthew Thomas
There are many settings where agents with differing types choose among assessments that attempt to measure these types. For example, students may take either the SAT or ACT. Bond issuers may choose between the three main rating agencies. Assessments that provide higher ratings are obviously preferable to all agents. Preferences over risk are less obvious. Intuitively, low types prefer less accurate assessments because they can benefit more from mistakes. High types prefer more accurate assessments because they benefit from an accurate description of their type. We propose a condition on the assessments that ensures agents will choose them in an assortative manner. If the assessments have only two scores, this condition implies Blackwell’s informativeness criterion. However, this does not hold with three or more scores. When the assessments give the same unconditional distribution of scores, our condition implies the concordance order. We extend the analysis to repeated testing and mechanism design. We show that a principal can use menus of garbled assessments to improve the informativeness of high scores.
(abstract coming soon!)
References
Prof. Marciano Siniscalchi (Committee Co-Chair)
Prof. Alessandro Pavan (Committee Co-Chair)
Prof. Wojciech Olszewski