Announcements
Kareen Rozen is joining Brown from Yale University, where she has been Associate Professor since 2013. Her specialization is in economic theory, with an emphasis on behavioral economics but spanning other approaches and topics as well. More recently, she has also been working in the field of experimental economics.
Kareen Rozen has been at Yale since 2007. She joined Yale after completing her Ph.D. at Princeton University under the supervision of Eric Maskin.
Kareen Rozen’s research in behavioral economics examines both decision-theoretic and interactive settings, such as markets. Her recent work on “Competing for Consumer Inattention” shows how partially attentive consumers can improve consumer welfare as a whole. When consumers are less attentive, they are more likely to miss the best offer in each market. However, they introduce across-market competition that decreases the average price paid, as leading firms try to stay under the consumers’ radar. This work was coauthored with Geoffroy de Clippel and Kfir Eliaz, and was recently published as a lead article in the Journal of Political Economy.
In the field of decision theory, Rozen is particularly interested in dynamic reference dependence. Her earlier work on “Foundations of Intrinsic Habit Formation,” published in Econometrica, studies the axiomatic foundations of prevalent models in which consumption history affects future tastes. More recently, she and coauthor David Dillenberger address the empirical and neurobiological evidence that risk preferences vary with personal experiences. They propose a novel model that allows the unfolding of risk over time to dynamically affect risk attitudes. Their work, recently published in the Journal of Economic Theory, predicts that decision makers become more risk averse after a negative experience than after a positive one, and that sequencing matters. The earlier one is disappointed, the more risk averse one becomes.