arXiv subjects

Roberto Rozzi

Publications and source records attributed to Roberto Rozzi.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

An Evolutionary Analysis of Narrative Selection

We compare the evolutionary selection of agents who employ different heuristics to select the narratives through which they interpret new information. Agents' survival depends on the accuracy of their beliefs. Agents who choose narratives to align with the population's average belief have higher survival rates than those who use alternative heuristics. Conforming reduces an agent's belief variance but inherits the bias of the average belief, so it pays when the latter is close to the state's probability. Evolutionary selection helps maintain this proximity by eliminating inaccurate agents. The other heuristics survive as well, with their shares depending on the degree of uncertainty: agents who tend to form mild beliefs survive more when uncertainty is high, whereas those who tend to form extreme beliefs survive more when uncertainty is low. Conformism is usually considered detrimental, as it discards private information. In our model, conformist agents read their private information in light of the public information, and the consensus they anchor to consists of the agents that survived evolutionary selection, so the cost of conformism is limited.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Museums as Policy Tools: The Behavioral Impact of Cultural Experiences

Museums can serve as policy tools when their content is purposefully curated. We designed a framed field experiment at the Santa Maria della Scala museum in Siena that leveraged the site's historical role offering care and hospitality.Student visitors randomly assigned to a tour emphasizing this function later donated more to an NGO supporting refugee than those who followed a standard artistic itinerary, with effects concentrated among female participants. These results show that thematically targeted museum experiences can measurably boost charitable behavior toward vulnerable groups, underscoring the untapped potential of cultural institutions in behavioral public policy.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Misspecified beliefs and the evolution of peer pressure

We study the emergence of conformity preferences in an environment in which agents choose effort under heterogeneous, possibly misspecified returns, and social interactions do not directly affect material payoffs. Some agents choose effort by trading off performance and conformity to expected peer behavior. We characterize subjective best responses. For any given beliefs, an optimal and unique level of peer pressure exists and is evolutionarily stable within groups of agents sharing the same misspecification. Such a level is zero for correctly specified agents and may be positive for misspecified ones. When the efficient level of peer pressure is interior, misspecified agents choose effort equal to their true return, resulting in an equilibrium behavior that is both self-confirming and Nash, allowing the persistence of misspecifications. Peer pressure need not generate long-run allocative distortions, but it creates a perceived value of social information. In equilibrium, this value depends only on misspecification, generating scope for informational rents.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Criminal Property Rights Suppress Violence in Urban Drug Markets: Theory and Evidence from Merseyside, U.K

In this work, we provide empirical evidence on organized criminal groups' (OCGs) behavior across the Liverpool area in the U.K. (Merseyside). We find that violent crimes concerning OCGs concentrate in the areas yielding the highest revenue, while OGCs primarily control areas yielding middle or low revenue. We explain and generalize these empirical observations with a theoretical model examining how OCGs strategically select which area to exploit based on expected revenue and the presence of other OCGs. We prove our results for three OCGs analytically and extend them to larger numbers of OCGs through numerical simulations. Both approaches suggest that, when the frequency of OCG activity is sufficiently high, each OCG controls one area, while the violence between OCGs remains low across all areas. When the frequency of OCG activity reduces, violent collisions between OCGs occur in the areas yielding the highest revenue, while some OCGs retain control over the medium-revenue areas. Our results suggest important policy recommendations. Firstly, if interventions are only violence-driven, they might miss critical underlying factors. Secondly, police operations might have unintended negative externalities in other areas of a city when they target criminal property rights, like increased violence in the areas yielding the highest revenue.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

How manipulable are prediction markets?

In this paper, we conduct a large-scale field experiment to investigate the manipulability of prediction markets. The main experiment involves randomly shocking prices across 817 separate markets; we then collect hourly price data to examine whether the effects of these shocks persist over time. We find that prediction markets can be manipulated: the effects of our trades are visible even 60 days after they have occurred. However, as predicted by our model, the effects of the manipulations somewhat fade over time. Markets with more traders, greater trading volume, and an external source of probability estimates are harder to manipulate.

econ.GN↗