“Sport is the biggest global cultural practice. We in [the social sciences], I think, have neglected it at our peril.” -Silke-Maria Weineck

Current Projects

2024

Salience-driven overcompensation in WNBA referees
Race, color, and gender discrimination persistently shape labor market outcomes, influencing hiring, performance evaluations, and decision-making across sectors. This study investigates whether increased awareness of implicit bias can mitigate its impact over time in a high-stakes context. Leveraging two decades of data and employing weighted regression estimations with multi-level fixed effects, we identify causal relationships between race, color, and gender in the evaluation of employees.

Novel point transfer mechanism to fix the NBA Draft
In repeated strategic interactions with a final reward—such as employee promotions or grant allocations—a key challenge is designing mechanisms that encourage sustained high effort while ensuring equitable outcomes. Traditional methods, like lotteries or outcome-contingent rewards, often fall short, failing to maintain engagement and inadvertently discouraging early underperformers. We propose a performance-weighted allocation mechanism inspired by dynamic rating systems, which continuously adjusts each agent’s probability of receiving the reward based on cumulative performance relative to others. This adaptive design maintains engagement by linking reward probability to performance history, ensuring maximal effort as a subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE).

Making decision education more approachable for K-12 students using tangible sports examples
A project to develop hands-on lesson plans that use sports scenarios (e.g. penalty kicks, free-throw contests) to teach probability, expected value, and decision trees to middle and high-schoolers.

Working Papers

2025

Journals

2025