avatar

Ben Wincelberg

Ph.D. Candidate in Economics, Caltech

About Me

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at Caltech working in microeconomic theory. I am interested in decisions under uncertainty, strategic interaction, and stochastic choice.

I will be on the 2026-27 job market.

Working Papers

  1. Risk Aversion Reversals Job Market Paper
    with Po Hyun Sung
    Extended Abstract at EC '26. Awarded Best Third Year Paper, HSS Caltech (2025)

    Which stochastic choice models preserve the connection between risk aversion in preferences and behavior, and which reverse it?

  2. with Fedor Sandomirskiy, Po Hyun Sung, and Omer Tamuz
    Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy

    When players favor stochastically dominating options given each other’s behavior and consider each game in isolation, play resembles Nash or logit quantal response equilibrium

  3. with Fedor Sandomirskiy, Po Hyun Sung, and Omer Tamuz
    Conditionally Accepted, American Economic Review

    Random coefficients logit is the only rule whose predictions are unaffected by irrelevant decisions

  4. with Fedor Sandomirskiy
    Extended Abstract at EC '26

    Which strategic environments are robust to players delegating decisions to AI agents, cartel managers, and other intermediaries?

  5. with Ted O'Donoghue, Charles Sprenger, and Po Hyun Sung

    When do differences between choices and valuations reveal unstable preferences, and when can noise explain them?

In Progress

  • The Insured-Thing Principle and f-Divergence Risk Measures
    with Tommaso Denti, Luciano Pomatto, and Po Hyun Sung

    A characterization of f-divergence risk measures by weakening the sure-thing principle

  • Foundations for Robust Optimization: Divergence Preferences
    with Tommaso Denti, Luciano Pomatto, and Po Hyun Sung

    Misspecification aversion characterizes robust optimization in which alternative models are penalized by statistical divergences

  • Stochastically Ordered Random Utilities
    with Po Hyun Sung

    New testable implications of i.i.d. additive random utility and its generalizations

  • Bracketing in Rational Inattention
    with Luciano Pomatto and Po Hyun Sung

    Shannon entropy costs are characterized by independent behavior across independent problems