Uri Gneezy and Katie Baca-Motes write in Time: "Leaning In Won’t Fix the Gender Gap (Yet)"
I especially like their last sentence
"Don’t make the job interview more competitive than the job itself!"
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Microaggressions
The NYtimes has an article on "Students See Many Slights as Racial ‘Microaggressions’" by Tanzina Vega.
"A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American’s ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino’s ability to speak English without an accent.
This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour — microaggressions — used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture."
See also the article in the guardian, on "Oxford University's cultural elitism has been exposed by this student campaign"
" Inspired by a similar effort at Harvard, a viral campaign called I, too, am Oxford surfaced last week highlighting the prejudices students from ethnic minority backgrounds experience at the university. It featured pictures of students holding up placards that read "No, I'm not on a scholarship from Africa" and "My voice is not the voice of all black people"; even one saying "I do not sell cocaine"."
"A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American’s ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino’s ability to speak English without an accent.
This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour — microaggressions — used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture."
See also the article in the guardian, on "Oxford University's cultural elitism has been exposed by this student campaign"
" Inspired by a similar effort at Harvard, a viral campaign called I, too, am Oxford surfaced last week highlighting the prejudices students from ethnic minority backgrounds experience at the university. It featured pictures of students holding up placards that read "No, I'm not on a scholarship from Africa" and "My voice is not the voice of all black people"; even one saying "I do not sell cocaine"."
Friday, March 21, 2014
Dan Fragiadakis: a new Ph.D
Dan Fragiadakis defends his Ph.D. dissertation.
His three papers in his thesis are:
Improving Welfare in Assignment Problems: an Experimental Investigation (with Peter Troyan).
Many institutions face the task of allocating objects (such as university dormitories) to individuals (students) without the use of monetary transfers. A common solution to this problem is the Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD): agents are ordered randomly, and one at a time, each is assigned her favorite good according to her submitted preferences. While RSD provides each agent with a dominant strategy of ranking objects truthfully, it may produce socially undesirable outcomes whereby it is possible to make some agents substantially better off at only a small cost to others. In this paper, we study the prospect of raising welfare in assignment problems by incentivizing agents to report goods they value similarly as indifferent. Specifically, we modify RSD by ordering agents earlier who report more indifference, a method similar to that used by the Stanford Graduate School of Business to assign MBA students to educational trips abroad. While theory predicts weak welfare gains in equilibrium, this requires agents to calculate nontrivial best response strategies that deviate from simple truth-telling. In practice, it is unknown whether agents will be able to find these equilibria and, if they cannot, what the welfare implications of using such mechanisms will be. Motivated by these observations, we run a lab experiment where we find that many agents follow natural heuristics that entail reporting indifferences between objects that are similar in value. Average earnings increase significantly compared to RSD, but the way in which indifference is rewarded can alter the variance in earnings. This suggests that institutions that use RSD can benefit by rewarding indifference, but should choose how to do so carefully.
Identifying Predictable Players: Relating Behavioral Types and Predictable Subjects (with Muriel Niederle and Daniel Knoepfle).
Behavioral game theory models are useful in organizing data of strategic decision making. However, are subjects classified as behavioral types more predictable than unclassified subjects? Alternatively, how many predictable subjects await new behavioral models to describe them? In our experiments, subjects play two-person guessing games against random opponents and are subsequently asked to replicate or best respond to their past choices. We find that existing behavioral types capture two thirds of strategic subjects, i.e. individuals who can best respond. However, there is additional room for non-strategic rule-of-thumb strategies to describe subjects that can merely replicate their actions.
Market Design under Distributional Constraints: Diversity in School Choice and Other Applications (with Peter Troyan).
Distributional constraints are important in many market design settings. Prominent examples include the minimum manning requirements at each branch in military cadet matching and diversity in school choice, whereby school districts impose constraints on the demographic distribution of students at each school. Standard assignment mechanisms implemented in practice are unable to accommodate all of these constraints. This leads policymakers to resort to ad-hoc solutions that eliminate blocks of seats ex-ante (before agents submit their preferences) to ensure that all constraints are satisfied ex-post.
We show that these solutions ignore important information contained in the submitted preferences, resulting in avoidable inefficiency. We introduce a new class of dynamic quotas mechanisms that allow the institutional quotas to dynamically adjust to the submitted preferences of the agents. We show how a wide class of mechanisms commonly used in the field can be adapted to our dynamic quotas framework. Focusing in particular on a new dynamic quotas deferred acceptance (DQDA) mechanism, we show that DQDA Pareto dominates current solutions. While it may seem that allowing the quotas to depend on the submitted preferences would compromise the strategyproofness of deferred acceptance, we show that this is not the case: as long as the order in which the quotas are adjusted is determined exogenously to the preferences, DQDA remains strategyproof. Thus, policymakers can be confident that efficiency will be improved without introducing perverse incentives. Simulations with school choice data are used to quantify the potential efficiency gains.
I blogged about him before
He will be joining the Economics department at Texas A&M next year.
Congratulations, Dan, and welcome to the club!
His three papers in his thesis are:
Improving Welfare in Assignment Problems: an Experimental Investigation (with Peter Troyan).
Many institutions face the task of allocating objects (such as university dormitories) to individuals (students) without the use of monetary transfers. A common solution to this problem is the Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD): agents are ordered randomly, and one at a time, each is assigned her favorite good according to her submitted preferences. While RSD provides each agent with a dominant strategy of ranking objects truthfully, it may produce socially undesirable outcomes whereby it is possible to make some agents substantially better off at only a small cost to others. In this paper, we study the prospect of raising welfare in assignment problems by incentivizing agents to report goods they value similarly as indifferent. Specifically, we modify RSD by ordering agents earlier who report more indifference, a method similar to that used by the Stanford Graduate School of Business to assign MBA students to educational trips abroad. While theory predicts weak welfare gains in equilibrium, this requires agents to calculate nontrivial best response strategies that deviate from simple truth-telling. In practice, it is unknown whether agents will be able to find these equilibria and, if they cannot, what the welfare implications of using such mechanisms will be. Motivated by these observations, we run a lab experiment where we find that many agents follow natural heuristics that entail reporting indifferences between objects that are similar in value. Average earnings increase significantly compared to RSD, but the way in which indifference is rewarded can alter the variance in earnings. This suggests that institutions that use RSD can benefit by rewarding indifference, but should choose how to do so carefully.
Identifying Predictable Players: Relating Behavioral Types and Predictable Subjects (with Muriel Niederle and Daniel Knoepfle).
Behavioral game theory models are useful in organizing data of strategic decision making. However, are subjects classified as behavioral types more predictable than unclassified subjects? Alternatively, how many predictable subjects await new behavioral models to describe them? In our experiments, subjects play two-person guessing games against random opponents and are subsequently asked to replicate or best respond to their past choices. We find that existing behavioral types capture two thirds of strategic subjects, i.e. individuals who can best respond. However, there is additional room for non-strategic rule-of-thumb strategies to describe subjects that can merely replicate their actions.
Market Design under Distributional Constraints: Diversity in School Choice and Other Applications (with Peter Troyan).
Distributional constraints are important in many market design settings. Prominent examples include the minimum manning requirements at each branch in military cadet matching and diversity in school choice, whereby school districts impose constraints on the demographic distribution of students at each school. Standard assignment mechanisms implemented in practice are unable to accommodate all of these constraints. This leads policymakers to resort to ad-hoc solutions that eliminate blocks of seats ex-ante (before agents submit their preferences) to ensure that all constraints are satisfied ex-post.
We show that these solutions ignore important information contained in the submitted preferences, resulting in avoidable inefficiency. We introduce a new class of dynamic quotas mechanisms that allow the institutional quotas to dynamically adjust to the submitted preferences of the agents. We show how a wide class of mechanisms commonly used in the field can be adapted to our dynamic quotas framework. Focusing in particular on a new dynamic quotas deferred acceptance (DQDA) mechanism, we show that DQDA Pareto dominates current solutions. While it may seem that allowing the quotas to depend on the submitted preferences would compromise the strategyproofness of deferred acceptance, we show that this is not the case: as long as the order in which the quotas are adjusted is determined exogenously to the preferences, DQDA remains strategyproof. Thus, policymakers can be confident that efficiency will be improved without introducing perverse incentives. Simulations with school choice data are used to quantify the potential efficiency gains.
I blogged about him before
He will be joining the Economics department at Texas A&M next year.
Congratulations, Dan, and welcome to the club!
Google searches and gender
The NYtimes has an interesting op ed by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: "Google, Tell Me. Is My Son a Genius?"
It starts with
"It’s hardly surprising that parents of young children are often excited at the thought that their child may be gifted. In fact, of all Google searches starting “Is my 2-year-old,” the most common next word is “gifted.” But this question is not asked equally about young boys and young girls. Parents are two and a half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?” Parents show a similar bias when using other phrases related to intelligence that they may shy away from saying aloud, like, “Is my son a genius?”
And
"In American schools, girls are 11 percent more likely than boys to be in gifted programs. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls.
Parents were more likely to ask about sons rather than daughters on every matter that I tested related to intelligence, including its absence. There are more searches for “is my son behind” or “stupid” than comparable searches for daughters. Searches with negative words like “stupid” and “behind,” however, are less skewed toward sons than searches with positive words.
What concerns do parents disproportionately have for their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance. Consider questions about a child’s weight. Parents Google “Is my daughter overweight?” roughly twice as frequently as they Google “Is my son overweight?” Just as with giftedness, this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 30 percent of girls are overweight, while 33 percent of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see — or worry about — overweight girls much more often than overweight boys."
The most intriguing picture may be:
He ends with
"How would American girls’ lives be different if parents were half as concerned with their bodies and twice as intrigued by their minds?"
It starts with
"It’s hardly surprising that parents of young children are often excited at the thought that their child may be gifted. In fact, of all Google searches starting “Is my 2-year-old,” the most common next word is “gifted.” But this question is not asked equally about young boys and young girls. Parents are two and a half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?” Parents show a similar bias when using other phrases related to intelligence that they may shy away from saying aloud, like, “Is my son a genius?”
And
"In American schools, girls are 11 percent more likely than boys to be in gifted programs. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls.
Parents were more likely to ask about sons rather than daughters on every matter that I tested related to intelligence, including its absence. There are more searches for “is my son behind” or “stupid” than comparable searches for daughters. Searches with negative words like “stupid” and “behind,” however, are less skewed toward sons than searches with positive words.
What concerns do parents disproportionately have for their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance. Consider questions about a child’s weight. Parents Google “Is my daughter overweight?” roughly twice as frequently as they Google “Is my son overweight?” Just as with giftedness, this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 30 percent of girls are overweight, while 33 percent of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see — or worry about — overweight girls much more often than overweight boys."
The most intriguing picture may be:
He ends with
"How would American girls’ lives be different if parents were half as concerned with their bodies and twice as intrigued by their minds?"
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Graduate Students on the JM: Pete Troyan
Pete Troyan is a theorist with a strong interest in matching theory who is also open to experiments. His JM paper, joint with Dan Fragiadakis (about whom I blogged yesterday), is theory paper on matching: Specifically, it deals with two-sided matching problems, where the other side may be objects or agents (such as medical residency positions to medical students, school slots to students, military assignments to military cadets, etc). Their starting point is that often in such assignments, the designer (the school board, the medical association etc) wants to have fulfill certain distributional constraints: for example a minimum number of medical residents in rural areas, or cadets in each branch, or, thinking about diversity, demographic distributions in each school.
The abstract continues as:
"Standard assignment mechanisms implemented in practice are unable to accommodate all of these constraints. This leads policymakers to resort to ad-hoc solutions that eliminate blocks of seats ex-ante (before agents submit their preferences) to ensure that all constraints are satisfied ex-post.
We show that these solutions ignore important information contained in the submitted preferences, resulting in avoidable inefficiency. We introduce a new class of dynamic quotas mechanisms that allow the institutional quotas to dynamically adjust to the submitted preferences of the agents. We show how a wide class of mechanisms commonly used in the field can be adapted to our dynamic quotas framework. Focusing in particular on a new dynamic quotas deferred acceptance (DQDA) mechanism, we show that DQDA Pareto dominates current solutions. While it may seem that allowing the quotas to depend on the submitted preferences would compromise the strategyproofness of deferred acceptance, we show that this is not the case: as long as the order in which the quotas are adjusted is determined exogenously to the preferences, DQDA remains strategyproof. Thus, policymakers can be confident that efficiency will be improved without introducing perverse incentives. Simulations with school choice data are used to quantify the potential efficiency gains."
Pete has, next to his JM paper which is an theory paper on matching, three more matching papers, one of which is already published, and one of which is an experiment (the paper that Dan Fragiadakis uses as a JM paper). Pete has also theory work not related to matching.
The abstract continues as:
"Standard assignment mechanisms implemented in practice are unable to accommodate all of these constraints. This leads policymakers to resort to ad-hoc solutions that eliminate blocks of seats ex-ante (before agents submit their preferences) to ensure that all constraints are satisfied ex-post.
We show that these solutions ignore important information contained in the submitted preferences, resulting in avoidable inefficiency. We introduce a new class of dynamic quotas mechanisms that allow the institutional quotas to dynamically adjust to the submitted preferences of the agents. We show how a wide class of mechanisms commonly used in the field can be adapted to our dynamic quotas framework. Focusing in particular on a new dynamic quotas deferred acceptance (DQDA) mechanism, we show that DQDA Pareto dominates current solutions. While it may seem that allowing the quotas to depend on the submitted preferences would compromise the strategyproofness of deferred acceptance, we show that this is not the case: as long as the order in which the quotas are adjusted is determined exogenously to the preferences, DQDA remains strategyproof. Thus, policymakers can be confident that efficiency will be improved without introducing perverse incentives. Simulations with school choice data are used to quantify the potential efficiency gains."
Pete has, next to his JM paper which is an theory paper on matching, three more matching papers, one of which is already published, and one of which is an experiment (the paper that Dan Fragiadakis uses as a JM paper). Pete has also theory work not related to matching.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Graduate Students on the JM: Dan Fragiadakis
Dan Fragiadakis is an experimental economist with a strong background in matching theory. His JM paper, joint with Pete Troyan (about whom I'll blog tomorrow), is an experiment on matching: Specifically, it deals with the issue where objects are allocated to agents without the use of money (such as school slots to students, teaching assignments at TFA to applicants, houses to college students, or trips abroad to MBA's at many business schools). Their main point is that while market designers have in the past promoted strategy-proof mechanisms, in some environments non-strategyproof mechanisms (such as the one employed by Stanford GSB) may yield superior outcomes not only in theory but also in experiments.This suggests that we should reopen the debate, as market designers, on the use of non-strategyproof mechanisms.
Dan has, next to his JM paper which is an experiment on matching, one more experimental paper (joint with me and Dan Knoeplfe, another Stanford grad student), and two theory papers on matching, one of which is the paper that Pete Troyan uses as his JM paper. I'll blog about Pete Troyan tomorrow.
Dan has, next to his JM paper which is an experiment on matching, one more experimental paper (joint with me and Dan Knoeplfe, another Stanford grad student), and two theory papers on matching, one of which is the paper that Pete Troyan uses as his JM paper. I'll blog about Pete Troyan tomorrow.
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