Marta Serra-Garcia

Marta Serra-Garcia is the Phyllis and Daniel Epstein Chancellor's Endowed Faculty Fellow and an Associate Professor of Economics and Strategy at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego. Her research examines the economics of informed societies: How can we build an informed public with the right level of trust when attention is scarce, incentives reward engagement over accuracy, and people have limited cognitive resources? Using experiments, theory, and computational methods, she studies how incentives shape what gets produced and amplified online and how these information environments shape knowledge gaps, biased beliefs, and trust in AI. 

Her work has been published in leading journals, such as the American Economic Review, Management Science, 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 has received the Excellence in Teaching MBA Award at UCSD. Serra-Garcia serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Economics and an Associate Editor of the Economic Journal. Her research has been covered by major news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. 

Selected Publications

"The Attention-Information Tradeoff", American Economic Review, forthcoming.

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

"Improving Human Deception Detection Using Algorithmic Feedback" with Uri Gneezy. Management Science, 72 (5), vii-x, 9869-10753 . 

“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. [Paper]

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

"Incentives and Defaults Can Increase COVID-19 Vaccine Intentions and Test Demand" with Nora Szech. Management Science 69 (2), 723-1322, iii-iv.[Paper]

"Risk Attitudes and Conflict in the Household" (2022), Economic Journal 132 (642), 767-795.

"Mistakes, Overconfidence and the Effect of Sharing in Detecting Lies," with Uri Gneezy (2021). American Economic Review 111 (10), 3160-3183.

"The (In)Elasticity of Moral Ignorance" with Nora Szech (2022). Management Science 68 (7), 4755-5555, iv-v.

"Non-replicable Publications Are Cited More than Replicable Ones," with Uri Gneezy (2021). Science Advances 7 (21), eabd1705. [Data]

"Time-Inconsistent Charitable Giving", with Jim Andreoni (2021), Journal of Public Economics 198, 104391. [Paper, July 2020 Version][Data]

"The Pledging Puzzle: How Can Revocable Promises Increase Charitable Giving?", with Jim Andreoni (2021), Management Science 67 (10), 5969-6627. [Paper][Data]

"Can Short Psychological Interventions Affect Academic Performance? Revisiting the Effect of Self-Affirmation Interventions", with Uri Gneezy and Karsten Hansen, Psychological Science (2020), 31 (7), 865-872. [Paper][Data]

"Bribing the Self", with Uri Gneezy, Silvia Saccardo and Roel van Veldhuizen, Games and Economic Behavior (2020) 120, 311-324. [Paper][Data]

"The Impact of Financial Education on Adolescents' Intertemporal Choices", with Melanie Lührmann and Joachim Winter, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2018) 10 (3), 309-332. [Paper][Data]

"The Threat of Exclusion and Implicit Contracting", with Martin Brown, Management Science (2017), 63 (12), 4081 - 4100. [Paper][Data]

"Peer Effects in Risk Taking: Envy or Conformity?", with Amrei Lahno, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty (2015), 50, 75-93. [Data]

"Measuring lying aversion", with Uri Gneezy and Bettina Rockenbach, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2013), 93, 293-300.[Paper][Data]

"Lying about what you know or about what you do?", with Eric van Damme and Jan Potters, Journal of the European Economic Association (2013), 11 (5), 1204-1229. [Paper][Data]

"Hiding an Inconvenient Truth: Lies and Vagueness", with Eric van Damme and Jan Potters, Games and Economic Behavior (2011) 73, 244-261. [Paper][Data]

Working Papers

"Mission Possible: Data Quality in Online Surveys" with Can Celebi, Christine Exley, Soeren Harrs, Hannu Kivimaki, and Jeffrey Yusof, current draft here.

"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. 

"Gender Pay Gaps in the Social Sciences" with Ayelet Gneezy, Uri Gneezy, Joshua Graff Zivin, Gaurav Khanna, and Elizabeth Lyons. Revisions requested.

"Give Enough or Not at All" with Jean Zhang, Gal Smitiszky, and Ayelet Gneezy, Revise and resubmit, at Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

Book Chapters

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

"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. [PDF]

“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. [PDF]

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

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

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