Behavioral and experimental economist at NYU Abu Dhabi
I’m Davide Marchiori. I study how people learn, adapt and develop strategic reasoning through experience, and what changes when the other side of the table is an artificial agent. My tools are lab experiments, eye-tracking and process-tracing, and computational models.
Published in Science, Nature Communications, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Economic Psychology and Scientific Reports.
Demo: a level-2 scanpath
You choose a row; the other player chooses a column. In each cell your payoff is the bold number, theirs is the grey one. Read the numbers with your mouse, then click a row.
The circles show where a level-2 player looks: the other player’s payoffs first, then their own payoffs in the column they expect.
Stream 1
Building on my eye-tracking work on the plasticity of strategic sophistication (Journal of Economic Theory, 2021), this stream studies how strategic reasoning is learned, how persistent it is, and whether it transfers across games and environments.
Learning, persistence, and transfer of strategic sophistication
Presented at IMESS 2026, NYU Paris.
Heuristic play through equilibrium-consistent feedback
Under review, Theory and Decision.
Stream 2
A natural extension of the first stream to settings where the counterpart is an algorithm.
Beliefs about AI reasoning
How people attribute depth of reasoning to AI counterparts in normal-form games, using process-tracing to separate beliefs about the opponent from one’s own reasoning depth.
Learning from AI counterparts
Whether repeated interaction with AI agents of controlled sophistication changes human strategic reasoning, and whether those changes transfer to games against humans.
Negotiation and delegation
Bargaining with large-language-model agents and the decision to delegate strategic choices to AI, with implications for institutional and market design.
Senior Research Scientist
Center for Behavioral Institutional Design (C-BID), NYU Abu Dhabi
Laboratory Technologist, Behavioral Research Support
IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy
Associate and Assistant Professor
University of Southern Denmark
Faculty and research positions
Ca’ Foscari Venice, NCCU Taipei, Technion
Behavioural Policy for Family workshop
The Policy Institute, King’s College London. Participant.
Learning, Persistence, and Transfer of Strategic Sophistication
4th International Meeting in Experimental Social Science (IMESS), joint workshop with NYU Abu Dhabi C-BID and NYU CESS, NYU Paris.
Excessive and conspicuous consumption: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates
Revise and resubmit, Behavioural Public Policy.