A Note on Research Identity
A recurrent theme motivating my research is the question of when heterogeneity can be transformed into collective order and when it instead gives rise to clash.
A fundamental premise of my academic inquiry is heterogeneity — in information, preferences, judgment, and beyond — and the subjectivity that often accompanies it.
Much of social life is the search for a balance between individual freedom and collective order. Sometimes clash arises because we want the same thing but resources are scarce. Sometimes we want different things but a single collective decision must be made. Sometimes we agree on ends but disagree in our information, judgment, or beliefs about the best way to achieve them. Over time, we evolve cultures, norms, and institutions to govern how we interact: to coordinate, to avoid destructive conflict, to preserve individual freedom, and to make collective life possible.
What fascinates me is understanding the sources of disagreement, the institutional solutions we develop to manage them, and the reasons these solutions fail. Economists have studied many mechanisms for transforming individual heterogeneity into collective order: markets, contracts, communication, voting, authority, decentralization, and norms. But each mechanism works only under particular structural conditions.
Markets require goods and rights that are transferable and assessable. Contracts require outcomes that are verifiable, or at least commonly understood. Voting works best when disagreement is cross-cutting and losers can hope to win on another dimension. Communication requires credible channels and some common ground. My research asks what happens when these conditions change.
I study this question across three related settings.
When can heterogeneity be reconciled through learning?
When consensus is unavailable, how can disagreement still be aggregated?
When collective decisions are indivisible and utilities are not transferable, how do political institutions transform heterogeneous preferences into collective outcomes?
One strand of my work studies heterogeneity that can, at least in principle, be reconciled through learning. In social learning, agents begin with different beliefs and update by listening to others. The key questions are whether they reach consensus, how quickly they do so, and whether the consensus is wise.
My work on degree-weighted learning studies how listening rules affect these outcomes: what happens when agents place more weight on popular neighbors, or instead discount them? The paper shows that the same listening rule can create a tradeoff between speed and wisdom: faster convergence need not mean better collective learning.
My work on directed social learning studies the connecting pattern itself. In modern communication environments — platforms, media systems, organizations, and recommendation networks — attention is often asymmetric. People follow others who do not follow them back; creators broadcast to audiences they cannot fully hear; organizations transmit information through one-way channels. In these settings, influence is no longer simply local popularity, and convergence speed is not fully captured by the classical eigenvalue logic. Directed communication can create a gap between short-run disagreement and long-run convergence, so the same society may appear to be learning quickly in the long run while experiencing persistent or fluctuating disagreement in the short run.
A second strand studies heterogeneity that cannot simply be reconciled by more listening. In many economic and organizational settings, people do not merely have different information; they evaluate the same object differently. Output quality, worker contribution, policy performance, fairness, or organizational success may be subjective, non-verifiable, or interpreted differently from different positions.
In these environments, the goal is not to eliminate disagreement, but to design institutions that can aggregate judgments despite persistent disagreement and strategic behavior. My work on subjective evaluation, communication, and evaluation design studies who should evaluate, how evaluations should be combined, and how incentives change when agents know that judgments are subjective.
A third strand studies how political institutions transform heterogeneous preferences into collective outcomes. Politics is difficult not only because citizens disagree, but because many collective decisions are indivisible and utilities are often not transferable. A society may have to choose one policy, one law, one leader, or one public direction; the losing side cannot always be compensated.
Democratic institutions therefore need disagreement to be organized in ways that permit bargaining, alternation, and compromise. My ongoing work on issue cleavages studies how political actors structure this space of disagreement.
Across these projects, I study the institutional conditions under which disagreement can be learned from, aggregated, bargained over, or transformed into governance failure. Communication, evaluation, markets, contracts, voting, hierarchy, and decentralization are all solutions to clash, but they are not universal solutions. They work when the structure of disagreement fits the mechanism. They fail when the world changes: when information becomes subjective, when aggregation is engineered by platforms, when attention becomes asymmetric, when evaluators are strategic, or when political conflict shifts from transferable to non-transferable dimensions.
My broader goal is to understand not only why disagreement arises, but when societies can still turn it into collective order.