Bio
News (2/24/2022): I stand with Ukraine and its brave people.
News (12/23/2018): Central European University in Budapest announced this month that they are forced to move much of their academic operations to Vienna because of a 2017 Higher Education law in Hungary that appears to be tailored to expel CEU from Budapest (see this Wikipedia article for details). I have worked with several people from CEU and I deeply admire the institution. This move is a great loss to Hungary and to academic freedom in general. While this forced move is now a fact, CEU's history as a vibrant and hugely successful university in the heart of Budapest should not be forgotten.
My main research agenda deals with the economics of social networks. On the theory side, I build models of learning, coordination and cooperation within social networks. I am particularly interested in how social networks can generate trust. In joint work with my coauthors Adam Szeidl, Tanya Rosenblat, Attila Ambrus and Dean Karlan we developed the social collateral approach to social capital which provides a tractable framework to think about repeated games in social networks. We created a dedicated website which lists our relevant research papers as well as software:
The Social Collateral Approach to Social Capital
On the empirical side, I use a combination of lab and field experiments with real social networks to estimate these models. In a second line of research I have explored the impact of non-resume variables like confidence and physical attractiveness in the labor market. Recently, I have also become interested in using browsing data to analyze the economics of online news consumption.