Alessandra Casella

Alessandra Casella started her teaching career at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor from 1987 to 1993. From 1996 to 2010, she was the part-time Director of Studies at Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Sciences Sociales (EHESS) based in Paris, France. In the time between her career in UC Berkeley and Director in EHESS, Casella became an associate Professor of Economics at Columbia University, New York, from 1993 till 1997. Her career with Columbia University continued where she eventually became a Professor of Economics at Columbia University in 1997 until current. Since then, Casella has taught Ph.D. courses in Experimental Methods in Political Economy and Special Topics in Political Economics. She has also taught undergraduate classes in Political Economy and Experimental Economics. Since 2017, Casella has also become a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.[1]

• 1996: Invited editor for the European Economic Review . A special issue on the domain of the state[1]
• 2007: Invited editor for the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. A special issue in honor of Economist Alan Kirman
• 2004 - 2009: Associate Editor for the Journal of Public Economic Theory
• 2013 - 2017: On the Editorial Board for the Journal of Experimental Political Science
• 2016 - current: Associate Editor for the American Economic Review

• 1988 - 1997: Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge
• 1988: Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research, London
• 1994 - 1995: Panel member at Economic Policy[1]
• 1997: Research associate at National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge
• 2004 - 2006: Economics panel member at the National Science Foundation
• 2012: Director at Columbia Experimental Laboratory for Social Sciences
• 2013 - 2016: Scientific Board member at AXA Research Fund

Working with her colleague Adam B. Cox, Casella creates a model that would address the problems that the temporary labor visa has in the United States. The three main concerns are: inefficient visa allocation, inability to protect domestic workers, and exploitation of migrant workers. The model focuses on reconfiguring the property rights by allocating a fixed number of temporary labor visas each year to maximize social surplus. Additional benefits that come with the model are minimized negative impact and exploitation of domestic and migrant workers. The goal of the proposed model would be creating a market with increased domestic employment, gains for both the government and foreign workers, and mitigated cost to firms through efficient labor allocation. To achieve this goal, Casella focuses on unbundling multiple property rights and redistributing them through market mechanisms that could counter the three main concerns of the current U.S. temporary labor visa rules.[4]

In this paper, Alessandra Casella and her colleagues, Navin Kartika, Luis Sancheza, and Sébastien Turbana, study people's tendencies to lie and the amount of trust that is associated in communication when lying is an option. Casella takes a closer look at understanding the way communication is interpreted by creating a trust game experiment. The study, approved by Columbia University and New York University Institutional Review Boards, was done online and in the laboratory via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The participants for the experiment were students enrolled at New York University. The game consisted of a sender and a receiver where the sender decides how to split $10. The study found that the senders are affected by competition, leading to higher offers. However, the findings show no effect on the expected transfer, the transfer itself, nor the receiver. Nonetheless, the results of the study showed that competition does alter communication understanding between participants.[5]

Alessandra Casella worked with Sébastien Turban to study the competitive equilibrium of the voting market. In this market, before making a decision, voters can trade their vote in for numeraire. In elections where majority wins, it is known that the voters are treated equally with symmetrical options, which leads to sincere voting. However, this voting method does not take into account the intensity of voters’ preferences. Without knowing the intensity of the vote, it is difficult to maximize the utilitarian welfare. This research aims to resolve this issue by creating a market for votes. The idea of this research is to apply the concept of efficient goods allocation in the market to the voting market. If goods are allocated to individuals who value them the most, the same logic applied to votes will maximize utilitarian welfare. Casella and Turban study the conditions required to create an equilibrium in the voting market before the voting itself takes place.[6]

Alessandra Casella and Nobuyuki Hanak study the debate economists and sociologists have about whether social networks can be artificially created. Information and trust between personal networks are a vital part of job applications, creating new capital, and moving. Especially when dealing with business, having personal ties can further economic success. Economists often believe that appropriate market mechanisms and policies can replace the lack of personal relations. On the other hand, Sociologists do often think that it is a personal relationship that develops naturally and, therefore, cannot be artificially replicated. The method of research was by borrowing James D. Montgomery's (1991) elegant model of the network. The results found that there were two types of networks: costless network and costly network. The costless network is personal referrals, which is often preferred for hiring because it requires less effort. However, the costly network is when people intentionally create personal connections, which can become a costly activity.[7]

• “Trading Votes for Votes. An Experiment” (with Thomas Palfrey), May 2017
• “Storable Votes and Quadratic Voting. An Experiment on Four California Propositions” (with Luis Sanchez), in progress.[1]