Valeria Burdea, Ph.D.

Valeria Burdea is an Assistant Professor (Akademische Rätin) in the Economics Department
at LMU. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Nottingham. Afterwards, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Political Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh, until joining LMU. Her work investigates the transmission and reception of information, belief dynamics and social learning.

Project at CAS:

During her residency, Valeria will investigate how individuals form and update mental models
of complex causal rules, and how these processes are shaped by social interaction. Using
theory and experiments, she will focus on identifying whether and how people revise their
models in response to disagreement, whether social interaction fosters convergence to correct rules or entrenches mis-specified ones, and how cognitive constraints influence model updating. The results aim to shed light on the persistence of disagreement and suboptimal decision-making in social environments.