About

Tim Cason is a Distinguished Professor at Purdue University and holds the Gadomski Chair in Economics. He is the Director of the Vernon Smith Experimental Economics Laboratory. His professional activities include serving as the Past President of the Economic Science Association, the international association of experimental economists. Cason has also contributed to academic publishing as a former editor of the journal Experimental Economics and as a co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics. Additionally, he has served on the editorial boards of several prominent journals, including Games and Economic Behavior, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Management Science, and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. His research focus is on experimental economics, and he maintains an active presence in the field through current research and publication of recent papers.

Research topics

• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Microeconomics
• Economics

Selected publications

• Norms in Conflict: Why AI Advisors Fail to Improve Human Coordination

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Ideological polarization and collective resistance

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-07-11

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Local inequality and own rank preferences

  Experimental Economics · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract We report a lab experiment to study subjects’ preferences over their ordinal rank in an earnings distribution. Following an assignment of unequal earnings, subjects can select a monetary transfer from exactly one individual to another, not including themselves. This can potentially change their own position in the distribution, as well as influence overall inequality. The experiment varies whether the initial earnings assignment is random or is affected by preliminary competition. It also varies the reference group from a complete to a partial network. A majority of observed transfers reduce inequality by moving earnings from those with the highest rank to the lowest rank in the distribution. Rank-improving transfers are substantially more common for preliminary competition losers than winners. Transfers to individuals outside of the reference group are not uncommon, and they usually target as the source the individuals high in the income distribution. While generally weak overall, own rank preferences appear to be more common among men than women.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Third party evaluation in conservation auctions

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-09-02

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Innovation and Information Free-Riding: An Experimental Investigation of Collective Experimentation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Selfish or Malicious: Price of malice in human-centric security decision-making for attack graph-based interdependent systems

  International Journal of Information Security · 2025-12-08 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Interdependent systems are increasingly vulnerable to rapidly growing cybersecurity threats. In this work, we investigate security decision-making in such systems, which are managed by multiple defenders. Each defender is tasked with protecting a specific subset of assets against potential attackers. The interdependencies among these assets are modeled using an attack graph, where edges between assets indicate that compromising one asset can enable an attack on another. Each edge is associated with a probability of successful attack, which can be mitigated through strategic security investments by the defenders. We employ game-theoretic models to analyze these systems and incorporate the effects of behavioral probability weighting bias, a well-documented phenomenon in human decision-making under risk. Additionally, we introduce malicious players into the framework, whose objective is to maximize the total social cost of the interdependent system. We demonstrate that malicious security games possess an equilibrium, providing a foundation for analyzing such systems. We then present examples to highlight the differences between the socially optimal solution and the equilibrium solutions under both selfish and malicious players. We then analyze the inefficiencies introduced by malicious players and behavioral probability weighting on the system’s social cost. We adapt widely-used metrics to quantify these inefficiencies, derive bounds, and show that the inefficiency grows exponentially with increases in the security budget. We evaluate our models using four representative real-world interdependent systems, comparing game-theoretic optimal investments with socially optimal investments. Furthermore, we benchmark our approach against four popular security resource allocation methods on attack graphs. This work provides a comprehensive framework for understanding and mitigating cybersecurity risks in interdependent systems, accounting for both behavioral biases and the presence of internal malicious actors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Environmental regulations and compliance

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-02-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Price Competition and Cooperation on Sustainable Investments1

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Third party evaluation in conservation auctions

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-09-02

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Ideological polarization and collective resistance

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-07-11

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Laboratory Studies of Transgression, Collective Resistance and social Interactions

  NSF · $151k · 2005–2008

Frequent coauthors

• Lata Gangadharan

  38 shared

• Vai‐Lam Mui

  Monash University

  37 shared

• Frans P. de Vries

  27 shared

• Michael J. Cuellar

  25 shared

• M Abrums

  Association of Schools of Allied Health Professions

  25 shared

• R Cocking

  American Association of Colleges of Nursing

  25 shared

• J Cusatis

  Association of Colleges

  25 shared

• N Canning

  Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

  25 shared

Labs

• Vernon Smith Experimental Economics LaboratoryPI

  1-2 sentence research focus

Education

• Ph.D.

  Purdue University

Awards & honors

• Purdue University Distinguished Professor
• Gadomski Chair in Economics