Marta Serra-Garcia

Marta Serra-Garcia is an Associate Professor at the Rady School of Management, UC San Diego. Her research in behavioral and experimental economics studies how the transmission of information shapes societies — influencing moral behavior, trust in public policies and science, and the adoption of new technologies, including AI. Her work uncovers novel patterns in decision-making and has been published in leading journals, such as the American Economic Review, Management Science, Science Advances, Economic Journal, and Psychological Science. In recognition of her contributions to research and teaching, she was named one of Poets & Quants’ “Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors” and she has also received the Executive MBA Teaching Award. 

Selected Publications

"Improving Human Deception Detection Using Algorithmic Feedback" with Uri Gneezy. CESifo Working Paper No. 10518.  Management Science. 

“REFORMS: Reporting Standards for Machine Learning Based Science” with Kapoor, S., Pham, H., Bail, C., Cantrell, E., Gundersen, O.E., Hofman, J., Hullman, J., Lones, M., Malik, M.M., Nanayakkara, P., Peng, K., Poldrack, R., Raji, I.D., Roberts, M., Salganik, M., Steward, B., Vandewiele, G., and A. Narayanan.   Science Advances.

"Enabling or Limiting Cognitive Flexibility? Evidence of Demand for Moral Commitment," with Silvia Saccardo.   American Economic Review 113 (2), 396-429.

Serra-Garcia, Marta and Nora Szech. “Incentives and Defaults Can Increase COVID-19 Vaccine Intentions and Test Demand”, Management Science (https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4405)

Serra-Garcia, Marta. “Risk Attitudes and Conflict in the Household,” Economic Journal 132 (642), 2022, 767-795.

Serra-Garcia, Marta and Uri Gneezy. “Mistakes, Overconfidence and the Effect of Sharing in Detecting Lies,” American Economic Review 11 (10), 2021, 3160-3183.

Serra-Garcia, Marta and Nora Szech. “The (In)Elasticity of Moral Ignorance,” Management Science, forthcoming (https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4153).

Andreoni, Jim and Marta Serra-Garcia. “The Pledging Puzzle: How Can Revocable Promises Increase Charitable Giving?,” Management Science, 2021, 67 (10), 5969-6627.

Andreoni, Jim and Marta Serra-Garcia. “Time-Inconsistent Charitable Giving,” Journal of Public Economics, 198, 104391, 2021.

Serra-Garcia, Marta and Uri Gneezy. “Non-replicable Publications Are Cited More than Replicable Ones,” Science Advances 7 (21), 2021.

Serra-Garcia, Marta, Hansen, Karsten and Uri Gneezy. “Can Short Psychological Interventions Affect Educational Performance? Revisiting the Effect of Self-Affirmation Interventions,” Psychological Science, 2020, 31 (7): 865-872.

Gneezy, Uri, Saccardo, Silvia, Serra-Garcia, Marta and Roel van Veldhuizen. “Bribing the Self” Games and Economic Behavior, 2020, 120: 311-324.  

Lührmann, Melanie, Serra-Garcia, Marta and Joachim Winter. “The Impact of Financial Education on Adolescents’ Intertemporal Choices,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2018, 10 (3): 309-332.

Brown, Martin and Marta Serra-Garcia. “The Threat of Exclusion and Implicit Contracting,” Management Science, 2017, 63 (12): 4081-4100.

Kalayci, Kenan and Marta Serra-Garcia. “Complexity and Biases”, Experimental Economics, 2016, 1: 31-50.

Lahno, Amrei, Serra-Garcia, Marta, D’Exelle, Ben and Arjan Verschoor. “Conflicting Risk Attitudes”, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2015) 118, 136-149.

Lahno, Amrei and Marta Serra-Garcia. “Peer Effects in Risk Taking: Envy or Conformity?”, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 2015, 50: 73-95.

Lührmann, Melanie, Serra-Garcia, Marta and Joachim Winter. “Teaching teenagers in finance: does it work?” Journal of Banking and Finance, 2015, 54: 160-174.

Gneezy, Uri, Rockenbach, Bettina and Marta Serra-Garcia. “Measuring Lying Aversion”, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2013, 93: 293-300.

Serra-Garcia, Marta, van Damme, Eric and Jan Potters. “Lying about What You Know or about What You Do?”, Journal of the European Economic Association, 2013, 11 (5): 1204-1229.

Serra-Garcia, Marta, van Damme, Eric and Jan Potters. “Hiding an Inconvenient Truth: Lies and Vagueness”, Games and Economic Behavior 2011, 73: 244-261.

Working Papers

"The Attention-Information Tradeoff", CESifo Working Paper No. 11885. 

"Why Don’t People Lie More? Truth Is (Wrongly) Believed To Be More Persuasive" with Uri Gneezy

"Understanding Trust in AI as an Information Source: Cross-Country Evidence," with Sanchaita Hazra, CESifo Working Paper No. 11954.

"Stereotypes in Generosity" with Christine Exley and John-Henry Pezzuto. 

"Give Enough or Not at All" with Jean Zhang, Gal Smitiszky, and Ayelet Gneezy.

Book Chapters

"Lying in Economics" (2018), The Oxford Handbook of Lying. Oxford University Press. 

 "Who Gives? The Roles of Empathy and Impulsivity," with Jim Andreoni and Ann-Kathrin Koessler (2018), The Economics of Philanthropy: Donations and Fundraising. MIT Press. 

“Lies in disguise – an experimental study on cheating (by Urs Fischbacher and Franziska Föllmi-Heusi)," with Uri Gneezy (2021). The Art of Experimental Economics – Twenty Top Papers Reviewed (eds. G. Charness and M. Pingle). Routledge. 

"Measuring Dishonesty" (2025), Handbook of Experimental Methods in the Social Sciences (Ed. Alex Rees-Jones). 

"Belief Management and Unethical Behavior" (2025), with Sam Lindquist and Silvia Saccardo. Research Handbook on Unethical Behavior. 

Current Research Awards

NSF Research Award: "The Information-Attention Tradeoff: Toward an Understanding of the Fundamentals of Online Attention," 2024-2027.

Research Areas

• Behavioral Economics
• Judgment & Decision Making 
• Misinformation
• Attention
• Media Economics
• Ethics and morality

Industry Areas

• Communication and Media
• Online Platforms
• Philanthropy