Luciano Pomatto

California Institute of Technology

I am a professor of economics at Caltech. My research is in microeconomic theory, mainly on choice under risk and uncertainty, theories of attention and information acquisition, forecasting, and Bayesian epistemology.

I graduated from Northwestern University, where I was advised by Alvaro Sandroni, and before Caltech, I spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cowles Foundation, Yale.

I am serving as an associate editor at the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Economic Theory, and the Journal of Mathematical Economics.

My curriculum vitae.

You can reach me at luciano@caltech.edu.

Working Papers

Modeling information acquisition via f-divergence and duality
with Alexander Bloedel and Tommaso Denti
We introduce a new cost function over experiments, f-information, based on the theory of multivariate statistical divergences, that generalizes Sims’s classic model of rational inattention as well as the class of posterior-separable cost functions. We characterize its behavioral predictions by deriving optimality conditions that extend those of Matějka and McKay (2015) and Caplin, Dean, and Leahy (2019) beyond mutual information. Using these tools, we study the implications of f-information in a number of canonical decision problems. A strength of the framework is that it can be analyzed using familiar methods of microeconomics: convex duality and the Arrow-Pratt approach to expected utility.
On the events satisfying the sure-thing principle
with Tommaso Denti
Given a preference relation over Anscombe-Aumann acts, we study the collection of events for which the preference satisfies Savage’s P2 axiom. We show that this collection is a sigma-algebra whenever the preference is monotone, suitably continuous, and satisfies the independence axiom over constant acts. We provide a relatively self-contained proof, which by and large builds on Gul and Pesendorfer (2014) and Grant, Liu, and Yang (2024).

Publications

Monotone additive statistics
with Xiaosheng Mu, Philipp Strack, and Omer Tamuz
Econometrica, 2024.
Background risk and small-stakes risk aversion
with Xiaosheng Mu, Philipp Strack and Omer Tamuz
American Economic Review: Insights, 2024.
The cost of information: The case of constant marginal costs
with Philipp Strack, and Omer Tamuz
American Economic Review, 2023.
Stable matching under forward-induction reasoning
Theoretical Economics, 2022.
Model and predictive uncertainty: A foundation for smooth ambiguity preferences
with Tommaso Denti
Econometrica, 2022.
Twofold multiprior preferences and failures of contingent reasoning
with Federico Echenique, Masaki Miyashita, Yuta Nakamura, and Jamie Vinson
Journal of Economic Theory, 2022.
From Blackwell dominance in large samples to Rényi divergences and back again
with Xiaosheng Mu, Philipp Strack, and Omer Tamuz
Econometrica, 2021.
Testable forecasts
Theoretical Economics, 2021.
Aggregate risk and the Pareto principle
with Nabil Al-Najjar
Journal of Economic Theory, 2020.
Stochastic dominance under independent noise
with Philipp Strack and Omer Tamuz
Journal of Political Economy, 2020.
An abstract law of large numbers
with Nabil Al-Najjar
Sankhya, Series A, 2020.
An axiomatic theory of inductive inference
with Alvaro Sandroni
Philosophy of Science, 2018.
Choice under aggregate risk
with Nabil Al-Najjar
Theory and Decision, 2016.
Claim validation
with Nabil Al-Najjar and Alvaro Sandroni
American Economic Review, 2014.
Merging and testing opinions
with Nabil Al-Najjar and Alvaro Sandroni
Annals of Statistics, 2014.

Teaching