Overview
“I’ve worked in so many areas—I’m sort of a dilettante. Basically, I’m not interested in doing research and I never have been. I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And often to understand something you have to work it out yourself because no one else has done it.”
My research examines how institutions make decisions about people, and how people make decisions within institutions. Across courts, local governments, public agencies, online platforms, workplaces, and markets, I study how rules, technologies, incentives, and organizational routines shape what people can see, choose, contest, and become responsible for.
A central theme in my work is that agency is always exercised under constraint. People act through the categories, scores, forms, prices, queues, legal rules, interfaces, languages, and roles that institutions make available to them. These systems make coordination possible, but they also shape which choices are visible, which tradeoffs feel possible, whose judgment counts, and where responsibility ultimately lands. My work asks how institutional systems can be designed so that they do not merely manage people, but help people and organizations act more responsibly.
I pursue this agenda through four connected lines of work: institutional decision-making and public systems; local law and the everyday state; human judgment in technical systems; and behavior, motivation, and collective judgment.