Harper Wallace

Harper's research concerns optimal representation and decision-making under constraints, both in humans, to explain anomalous behavioral phenomena, and in systems, to improve the quality of collective decisions. The unifying premise is that resource constraints on decision-makers determine which information is, or should be, preserved, distorted, or discarded in a given decision problem. On the human side, he studies how apparently anomalous choice behavior can emerge from efficient, constrained internal representations of the world. On the systems side, he studies how dispersed private judgments should optimally be aggregated in crowd-wisdom and collective-intelligence settings.