Abstract

This dissertation consists of three independent articles in the field of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. A common theme across all three chapters is the use of experimental methods to study the non-monetary costs that drive seemingly irrational behavior. The first chapter, titled "Self-Presentation" and co-authored with Leah Cao, examines how individuals form self-presentation strategies when reporting confidence about their personal attributes. Subjects first privately state their self- confidence and then report it publicly. We find that subjects bias their public reports toward the middle, with low-confidence individuals tending to over-report and high-confidence individuals tending to under-report. We provide evidence that under-reporting is related to social image motives. Self-presentation strategies make subjects appear more homogeneous in self-confidence than they actually are, making it difficult for others to infer individuals’ true attributes and reducing the accuracy of reported confidence. Our paper suggests that if communicated confidence is naively taken as an unbiased reflection of true ability, this distortion can lead to suboptimal decisions. The second chapter, titled "Motivated Beliefs: The Role of Information Accuracy," explores how the uncertainty about information accuracy affects the motivated belief formation. In a laboratory experiment, subjects receive noisy binary signals about their IQ and update their beliefs under three treatments: known accuracy (70\%), compound uncertainty (either 50\% or 90\% with equal probability), and ambiguity (either 50\% or 90\% with unknown probability). I find that when accuracy is known or ambiguous, individuals update rationally after positive signals but underweight negative ones, whereas under compound uncertainty they underweight both types of signals. This non-monotonic relationship between uncertainty and motivated belief formation may reflect the tension between people’s general dislike of uncertainty, which can lead to more pessimistic interpretations as ambiguity increases, and the fact that greater ambiguity also provides more flexibility to interpret information in ways that support preferred beliefs. The third chapter, titled "Lying Aversion and Vague Communication: An Experimental Study," joint work with Keh-Kuan Sun and published in the European Economic Review, studies how lying costs affect the use of vague communication. Using a novel experimental design that isolates the internal cost of lying from the social identity cost of appearing dishonest, we find that subjects exploit vagueness to remain consistent with the truth while leveraging imprecision to their advantage. More participants use vague messages in treatments where social identity concerns are relevant, and these concerns substantially influence both the length and the patterns of vague messages used.

Committee Chair

Brian Rogers

Committee Members

John Nachbar; Keh-Kuan Sun; Marcus Berliant; SangMok Lee

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Economics

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

4-20-2026

Language

English (en)

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Available for download on Monday, April 17, 2028

Included in

Economics Commons

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