Kremena Valkanova
I am a microeconomic theorist studying how people, algorithms, and societies make decisions, and how the choice environment shapes outcomes. My research spans stochastic choice, bounded rationality, social choice, and learning in games. I study what stochastic decisions reveal about preferences, cognition, and attention, and how to design institutions that promote fair and reliable collective outcomes.
I am currently a Research Scientist at Parity Technologies, where I work on voting system design and blockchain economic security. I completed my Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Zurich in 2021, followed by a postdoctoral position on mathematical democracy at ETH Zurich.
Research
Working Papers
Markov Stochastic Choice
We propose a Markovian model of sequential comparison to study how item arrangement affects choice, identifying when rearrangements are irrelevant and when observed choices reveal underlying consideration sets and decision processes.
Voting with Random Proposers: Two Rounds May Suffice
We study a randomized agenda-setting procedure that curbs manipulation and quickly selects the Condorcet winner, with applications to committees, legislatures, and decentralized governance.
Publications
Revealed Preference Domains from Random Choice
We define a new property of ordinal random utility models, exclusiveness, and show that many classical and novel preference domains satisfy it, enabling their direct identification from stochastic choice data.
Irrelevant Alternatives Bias Large Language Model Hiring Decisions
We document a robust attraction effect in GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 hiring decisions, demonstrating that LLMs reproduce a classic human choice bias.