My research examines how information, social influences, and sensory experiences shape consumer preferences and willingness to pay in food and wine markets through laboratory experiments and choice studies.

Recent work focuses on wine consumer behavior—tasting room dynamics, peer and expert influences on valuation, wine tourism (including COVID-19 impacts), and virtual wine experiences. I also study clean label preferences, examining how consumers perceive ingredient naturalness and navigate trade-offs between ingredient simplicity and product quality. This research integrates sensory science with economic valuation methods in collaboration with food scientists and hospitality researchers.

Applying behavioral economics to agricultural and environmental challenges reveals how farmers, land managers, and consumers respond to policies and incentives in ways that standard models don't predict. My work examines barriers to technology uptake and opportunities for more effective policy design.

Current projects include forestry manager decisions about worker safety under uncertainty, payment mechanisms for environmental services, and regulatory impacts on food markets. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, I develop behaviorally informed interventions that account for how people actually make decisions under risk and uncertainty.

Leading the Applied Experimental Economics Lab (AEELab) allows me to employ novel experimental methods in my research while training graduate students in these approaches. Key methodological contributions include the Random Quantity Mechanism—a cost-revealing procurement tool tested in laboratory and field settings—and methods for integrating sensory evaluation data with economic preference elicitation.

Beyond traditional experiments, my work incorporates diverse data sources including online social media data, video surveillance from retail environments, and real-time sales data from active stores. I'm particularly interested in discovering untapped data sources that can help answer behavioral and policy questions related to consumer choices and producer decisions in food, wine, and environmental markets. My approach combines experimental auctions, discrete choice experiments, and framed field experiments to provide credible causal identification.