Hi! My name is Maria Betto.

I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. My research interests are in Microeconomic Theory, including Choice and Decision Theory, Auctions, Information and Mechanism Design.

Experience

Johns Hopkins University

Assistant Professor, Jul ’24 – present

Northwestern University

Teaching Assistant, Sep ’18 – Jun ’24

Introduction to Microeconomics (ECON 202-0), Intermediate Microeconomics (ECON 310-1 and ECON 310-2), Economics of Risk and Uncertainty (ECON 331-0), Social and Economic Networks (MMSS 211-3), Game Theory (MMSS 311-1), Game Theory (PhD-level, ECON 410-3)

Won the Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award 2022-23

Education

Northwestern University

PhD in Economics, Jun ’24

Committee: Marciano Siniscalchi (co-chair), Alesssandro Pavan (co-chair) and Wojciezch Olzweski

Fields: Microeconomic Theory, Econometrics, Industrial Organization

MA in Economics, Jun ’18

Fundacao Getulio Vargas

MS in Business Economics, Jan ’17

Thesis: Dynamic Markets for Lemons

BA in Economic Sciences, Dec ’14

Best student of the ’14 graduating cohort (valedictorian)

Research

Job Market Paper

Cognition in Preferences and Choice

This paper models and analyzes the role of cognition in the refinement of preferences and choices. As cognition increases, choices become more selective, resulting in narrower sets of preferred options and finer rankings. To characterize this behavior, the classical rational-choice framework is extended through the introduction of a modified version of the Weak Axiom, called the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference Difficulty (WARPD). The paper shows that WARPD is equivalent to an interval-valued utility representation, where the size of the interval decreases monotonically with cognition. It also demonstrates that WARPD is equivalent to a fuzzy rationalizability concept, implying that cognition-dependent choices satisfying WARPD can be represented by a complete and transitive fuzzy binary relation. Finally, the paper describes two applications which highlight how consumers’ choice coarseness influences firms’ strategic pricing decisions in different competitive settings.

Publications

Asymmetric All-Pay Auctions with Spillovers

with Matthew W. Thomas, Accepted at Theoretical Economics, 2023

When opposing parties compete for a prize, the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner’s reward. These spillovers can have substantial influence on the equilibrium behavior of participants in applications such as lobbying, warfare, labor tournaments, marketing, and R&D races. To understand this influence, we study a general class of asymmetric, two-player all-pay auctions where we allow for spillovers in each player’s reward. The link between participants’ efforts and rewards yields novel effects — in particular, players with higher costs and lower values than their opponent sometimes extract larger payoffs.

Works in Progress

Choice over Assessments [Slides]

with Matthew W. Thomas

There are many settings where agents with differing types choose among assessments that attempt to measure these types. For example, students may take either the SAT or ACT. Bond issuers may choose between the three main rating agencies. Assessments that provide higher ratings are obviously preferable to all agents. Preferences over risk are less obvious. Intuitively, low types prefer less accurate assessments because they can benefit more from mistakes. High types prefer more accurate assessments because they benefit from an accurate description of their type. We propose a condition on the assessments that ensures agents will choose them in an assortative manner. If the assessments have only two scores, this condition implies Blackwell’s informativeness criterion. However, this does not hold with three or more scores. When the assessments give the same unconditional distribution of scores, our condition implies the concordance order. We extend the analysis to repeated testing and mechanism design. We show that a principal can use menus of garbled assessments to improve the informativeness of high scores.

Teaching

Notes on All-Pay Auctions

Detailed notes on the equilibrium construction of the symmetric all-pay auction with complete information.

A Gentle Introduction to the Edgeworth Box and Pareto Efficiency

Slides with basic concepts and examples for working through Edgeworth Box-type problems.

Contact

Department of Economics
Johns Hopkins University
Wyman Park Building 5th Floor
Baltimore, MD 21211
Phone: +1 410 516 7601