USF and Cornell Campus

I like taking pictures while conferencing

At USF

At Cornell

BEAM

Behavioral Economics Annual Meeting, this year in Cornell (I guess conference season starts..:)

Here's the program. I better overcome my jetlag to listen to my coauthor (luckily I am familiar with the paper...)


Monday, May 6, 2013

8:30-9:15 Breakfast Buffet On Site
9:15-9:30 Opening Remarks

9:30-10:15 Charlie Sprenger: “Working Over Time: Dynamic Inconsistency in Real Effort Tasks”
10:15-11:00 Emir Kamenica: “Suspense and Surprise”

11:00-11:30 Break

11:30-12:15 Ned Augenblick: “Testing for Excess Movement in Beliefs”

12:15-2:00 Lunch On Site

2:00-2:45 Cami Kuhnen: “Asymmetric Learning from Financial Information”
2:45-3:30 Alec Smith: “The Neural Basis of Irrational Exuberance During Experimental Stock Price
Bubbles”

3:30-4:00 Break

4:00-5:00 Overview Talk & Panel Discussion: Genoeconomics
Dan Benjamin, David Cesarini, and David Laibson

6:45 Dinner

Tuesday, May 7, 2013
8:30-9:00 Breakfast Buffet On Site
9:00-9:45 Denis Sosyura: “In the Mood for a Loan: The Causal Effect of Sentiment on Credit
Origination”
9:45-10:30 Tom Chang: “Looking for Someone to Blame: Delegation, Cognitive Dissonance and the
Disposition Effect”

10:30-11:00 Break

11:00-11:45 Andrei Shleifer: “Competition for Attention”
11:45-12:30 Klaus Schmidt: “Loss Aversion and Ex Post Inefficient Renegotiation”

12:30-2:00 Lunch On Site (with a takeaway option)

Family ties

Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano have a new paper "Family Ties"
"We study the role of the most primitive institution in society: the family. Its organization and relationship between generations shape values formation, economic outcomes and influences national institutions. We use a measure of family ties, constructed from the World Values Survey, to review and extend the literature on the effect of family ties on economic behavior and economic attitudes. We show that strong family ties are negatively correlated with generalized trust; they imply more household production and less participation in the labor market of women, young adult and elderly. They are correlated with lower interest and participation in political activities and prefer labor market regulation and welfare systems based upon the family rather than the market or the government. Strong family ties may interfere with activities leading to faster growth, but they may provide relief from stress, support to family members and increased wellbeing. We argue that the value regarding the strength of family relationships are very persistent over time, more so than institutions like labor market regulation or welfare systems."



This reminds me of Karl Kraus, who said "Das Wort Familienbande hat einen Beigeschmack von Wahrheit" or, loosely, the word family ties has an under-tone of truth.

BABEEW 2013

Tomorrow is the BABEEW: Bay Area Behavioral and Experimental Economics Workshop

at the Department of Economics University of San Francisco


The program is:


The USF School Address is: 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA 94117-1080.  Please park in the Upper/Lower Koret Center Lots located on the corner of Parker Avenue and Turk Street.

The workshop will be held in Fromm Hall. Fromm Hall is located on the corner of Parker Avenue and Golden Gate Avenue.



Saturday, May 4th
8:30 a.m. – 9:15 a.m. Breakfast Fromm Hall Lobby
9:15 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Welcome

9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. Parallel Sessions 1
1A: Games and Auctions Fromm Hall 125
Andrew Brownback: Grading on the Curve: Theory and Experiment (with James Andreoni)
Chloe Le Coq: Ingroup Projection in the Centipede Game (with James Tremewan, and Alexander K. Wagner)
Yumiko Baba: A Note on a Comparison of Simultaneous and Sequential Colonel Blotto Games, with an Application to Patent Lawsuits

1B: Intertemporal Choice Fromm Hall 115
Jeffrey Naecker: Demand for Commitment: Time Inconsistency or Signaling? (with Christine Exley)
Joshua Tasof: Exponential-Growth Bias and Lifecycle Consumption (with Matthew Levy)
Michael A. Kuhn: The Importance of the Cognitive Environment for Intertemporal Choice (with Peter Kuhn and Marie Claire Villeval)

10:30 a.m. – 10:40 a.m. Break Fromm Hall Lobby

10:40 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Parallel Sessions 2
2A: Social Preferences I Fromm Hall 125
John Lynham: Coase it’s Fehr: Property Rights and Social Preferences (with Andreas Leibbrandt)
Michael Visser: Different standards of fairness (with Emmit Visconti)
Paul Viotti: Stress and Inequity Aversion (with Mike Ennis)
Svetlana Pevnitskaya: The Effect of Endogenous Social Comparisons in Bayesian Games (with Robert White)

2B: Field Experiment Fromm Hall 115
Alessandra Cassar: Incentives and Support Groups Improve Economic Conditions: A Field Experiment in Medellin, Colombia (with Lauren Skora, Paulina Aguinaga, Jennifer Graham)
Emilia Tjernstrom: Subjective Expectation Formation - Evidence from a Natural Disaster in Fiji (with Wenbo Zou)
Lan Cheng: Moral Hazard, Risks and Index Insurance: A Framed Field Experiment in China
Michael Callen: Personalities and Public Sector Performance: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan (with Saad Gulzar, Ali Hasanain, Yasir Khan, and Arman Rezaee)

12:00 p.m. – 12:50 p.m. Lunch Fromm Hall Lobby
1:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Walking tour or relax

1:40 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Parallel Sessions 3
3A: Beliefs and Biases Fromm Hall 125
Geoff Fisher: The Computational Processes of Projection Bias (with Antonio Rangel)
John Ifcher: Positive Affect and Overconfidence: A Laboratory Investigation (with Hom Zarghamee)
Mustafa Gunaydin: Left-digit Bias in Household Decisions: Regression Discontinuity Design for Residential Energy End-Users (wih Galib Rustamov)
Peiran Jiao: Belief in Mean Reversion and the Disposition Effect: An Experimental Test

3B: Social Networks, voting Fromm Hall 115
and Insurance
François Pannequin: Risk lovers may also love insurance (with Anne Corcos and Claude Montmarquette)
John Morgan: Expressive Voting: Evidence from the Bundesliga (Martin Fochman, Karim Sadrieh, and Felix Vardy)
Kirill Chernomaz: Do people pay a premium to avoid complexity? Evidence from experimental insurance markets
Michael Caldara: Network Formation with Limited Observation (with Michael McBride)

3:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. Break Fromm Hall Lobby

3:20 p.m. – 4:40 p.m. Parallel Sessions 4
4A: Social Preferences II Fromm Hall 125
Christine Exley: Volunteer Behavior: Incentives and Expectations (with Jeffrey Naecker)
Fangfang Tan: Third-party punishment: retribution or deterrence? (with Erte Xiao)
Laura Gee: The Importance of Fairness in Mechanism Design: Application to Threshold Public Goods (with James Andreoni)
Zack Grossman: Self-Image and Strategic Ignorance in Moral Dilemmas (with Joël van der Weele)

4B: Information, Bargaining and Fromm Hall 115
Contracts
Ciril Bosch-Rosa: That's how we roll:
Jacopo Magnani: Information vs. Fear of Preemption in an Illiquid Market
Muriel Niederle: Bargaining under incomplete information (with Judd Kessler)
Rei Sayag: Paying is Believing: The Effect of Costly Information on Bayesian Updating (with Pedro Robalo)

4:40 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Break Fromm Hall Lobby

5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Parallel Sessions 5
5A: Gender Fromm Hall 125
Charles Holt: Dealing with Risk: Gender and Probability Effects (with Irene Comeig and Ainhoa Jaramillo-Gutiérrez)
Linda Kamas: Can Behavior in Laboratory Experiments Explain Gender Differences in Labor Market Outcomes? (with Anne Preston)
Smriti Sharma: Gender, Gender Pairings and Earned Income Rights: An Experimental Analysis

5B: Bidding and Market Fromm Hall 115
Performance
Chung-Ching Tai: How Cognitive Capacity Affects Our Market Performance? An Experimental Study Based on Working Memory Capacity (with Shu-Heng Chen and Lee-Xieng Yang)
Marion Ott: Reference-Dependent Bidding in Dynamic Auctions (with Karl-Marion Ehrhart)
Feven Wordofa: Gender Differences in Competitive Inclinations when Rewards are Gender-Salient: Evidence from an Experiment in China (with Alessandra Cassar, Stephanie Chou, Yilin Gao, Jane Zhang)
6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. Dinner & Happy Hour Fromm Hall Lobby

Women don't run

There is a description in science daily on gender differences in running for office: In "Young Women Do Not Want to Run for Office, Experts Say". they write:
"Lawless and Fox detail the results of a survey of a national sample of more than 2,100 college students. The authors find a dramatic gap between women and men's interest in running for office; men were twice as likely as women to have thought about running for office "many times," whereas women were 20 percentage points more likely than men never to have considered it. Importantly, the 20 point gap is just as large as the one we previously uncovered among adult professionals (in their 40s and 50s) who were well-situated to pursue a candidacy."

"The report identifies five factors that contribute to the gender gap in political ambition among college students:"

The last 3 are:

"3. Young men are more likely than young women to have played organized sports and care about winning.
4. Young women are less likely than young men to receive encouragement to run for office -- from anyone.
5. Young women are less likely than young men to think they will be qualified to run for office, even in the not-so-near future."

Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox report on "Girls Just Wanna Not Run The Gender Gap in Young Americans’ Political Ambition"

Stereotype Threat

Here is a collection of recent papers on stereotype threat that caught my eye...

Shapiro, Jenessa R.; Williams, Amy M.; Hambarchyan, Mariam  "Are all interventions created equal? A multi-threat approach to tailoring stereotype threat interventions." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 104(2), Feb 2013, 277-288.
"To date, stereotype threat interventions have been considered interchangeable. Across 4 experiments, the present research demonstrates that stereotype threat interventions need to be tailored to the specific form of experienced stereotype threat to be effective. The Multi-Threat Framework (Shapiro & Neuberg, 2007) distinguishes between group-as-target stereotype threats—concerns that a stereotype-relevant performance will reflect poorly on the abilities of one's group—and self-as-target stereotype threats—concerns that a stereotype-relevant performance will reflect poorly on one's own abilities. The present experiments explored Black college students' performance on diagnostic intelligence tests (Experiments 1 and 3) and women's interest (Experiment 2) and performance (Experiment 4) in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Across the 4 experiments, participants were randomly assigned to experience either a group-as-target or self-as-target stereotype threat. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that role model interventions were successful at protecting only against group-as-target stereotype threats, and Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that self-affirmation interventions were successful at protecting only against self-as-target stereotype threats. The present research provides an experimental test of the Multi-Threat Framework across different negatively stereotyped groups (Black students, female students), different negatively stereotyped domains (general intelligence, STEM), and different outcomes (test performance, career interest). This research suggests that interventions should address the range of possible stereotype threats to effectively protect individuals against these threats. Through an appreciation of the distinct forms of stereotype threats and the ways in which interventions work to reduce them, this research aims to facilitate a more complete understanding of stereotype threat."

Woodcock, Anna; Hernandez, Paul R.; Estrada, Mica; Schultz, P. Wesley The consequences of chronic stereotype threat: Domain disidentification and abandonment. Pages 635-646 Oct 2012, JPSP

"Stereotype threat impairs performance across many domains. Despite a wealth of research, the long-term consequences of chronic stereotype threat have received little empirical attention. Beyond the immediate impact on performance, the experience of chronic stereotype threat is hypothesized to lead to domain disidentification and eventual domain abandonment. Stereotype threat is 1 explanation why African Americans and Hispanic/Latino(a)s “leak” from each juncture of the academic scientific pipeline in disproportionately greater numbers than their White and Asian counterparts. Using structural equation modeling, we tested the stereotype threat-disidentification hypothesis across 3 academic years with a national longitudinal panel of undergraduate minority science students. Experience of stereotype threat was associated with scientific disidentification, which in turn predicted a significant decline in the intention to pursue a scientific career. Race/ethnicity moderated this effect, whereby the effect was evident for Hispanic/Latino(a) students but not for all African American students. We discuss findings in terms of understanding chronic stereotype threat. "

And a critical review on stereotype threat:

Can Stereotype Threat Explain the Gender Gap in Mathematics Performance and Achievement?

Gijsbert Stoet , David C. Geary, Review of General Psychology, 2012, Vol. 16, No. 1, 93–102

"Men and women score similarly in most areas of mathematics, but a gap favoring men is consistently found at the high end of performance. One explanation for this gap, stereotype threat, was first proposed by Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999) and has received much attention. We discuss merits and shortcomings of this study and review replication attempts. Only 55% of the articles with experimental designs that could have replicated the original results did so. But half of these were confounded by statistical adjustment of preexisting mathematics exam scores. Of the unconfounded experiments, only 30% replicated the original. A meta-analysis of these effects confirmed that only the group of studies with adjusted mathematics scores displayed the stereotype threat effect. We conclude that although stereotype threat may affect some women, the existing state of knowledge does not support the current level of enthusiasm for this as a mechanism underlying the gender gap in mathematics. We argue there are many reasons to close this gap, and that too much weight on the stereotype explanation may hamper research and implementation of effective interventions."

This paper, I guess because of its controversy, has received some attention at science daily blog 
"A University of Missouri researcher and his colleague have conducted a review that casts doubt on the accuracy of a popular theory that attempted to explain why there are more men than women in top levels of mathematic fields. The researchers found that numerous studies claiming that the stereotype, "men are better at math" -- believed to undermine women's math performance -- had major methodological flaws, utilized improper statistical techniques, and many studies had no scientific evidence of this stereotype."

I would be happy for comments, as it seems a big literature which I am somewhat familiar with but not really an expert on, I myself have never tried to manipulate stereotype threat...

Daily Horizons...

Here's an interesting piece by Uri Simonsohn and Francesca Gino: "Daily Horizons: Evidence of Narrow Bracketing in Judgment From 10 Years of M.B.A. Admissions Interviews"  Psychological Science, 24(2) 219– 224
The abstract reads:
"Many professionals, from auditors, venture capitalists, and lawyers, to clinical psychologists and journal editors, divide continuous flows of judgments into subsets. College admissions interviewers, for instance, evaluate but a handful of applicants a day. We conjectured that in such situations, individuals engage in narrow bracketing, assessing each subset in isolation and then—for any given subset—avoiding much deviation from the expected overall distribution of judgments. For instance, an interviewer who has already highly recommended three applicants on a given day may be reluctant to do the same for a fourth applicant. Data from more than 9,000 M.B.A. interviews supported this prediction. Auxiliary analyses suggest that contrast effects and nonrandom scheduling of interviews are unlikely alternative explanations of the observed pattern of results."