Mar. 15, John Roberts, Ph.D. – Does Working From Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment Abstract: About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000- employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel
Mar. 8, Tony Kwasnica, Ph.D. – A Laboratory Comparison of Auctions and Sequential Mechanisms Abstract: When bidders incur a cost to learn their valuations, bidder entry can impact auction performance. Two common selling mechanisms in this environment are an English auction, and a sequential bidding process. Bulow and Klemperer (2009) show, theoretically, that sellers should
Why Do We Want Prices in Health Care? by Megan McArdle Feb 27, The Daily Beast Other governments use fiat to set prices in the health care market. I talk to economist Bart Wilson about the potential pitfalls. A couple of days ago I fell to talking about price-setting in health care with a certified
Feb. 22nd, Jordi Brandts Bernad, Ph.D. – Let’s Talk: How communication affects contract design. The IFREE/ESI Lecture Series is free and open to the public. For more information on future lectures, please visit our website. A video of the lecture will be posted here soon. Abstract: We study experimentally how the ability to communicate affects
Feb. 1st, Ron Siegel, Ph.D. – Large Contests Abstract: We consider contests with many, possibly heterogeneous, prizes and players that include many existing contest models as special cases. We show that the outcome of such contests is approximated by an appropriately defined set of incentive-compatible individually-rational single-agent mechanisms. Bio: Ron Siegel is an assistant professor
It is five years since the Great Re-cession began in the fourth quarter of 2007. Measured in Depression Clock Time, it is 1934, when the U.S. economy expanded 7.7 percent. Today no such expansion is on the horizon. Rather, the economy is still mired in a low-growth rut, only the second such severe downturn since
Jan. 6th-10th, the Economic Science Institute, with a generous grant from the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREE), hosted 24 doctoral students from universities all over the world for the 18th Visiting Graduate Student Workshop in Experimental Economics. In a series of 10 sessions, the students first participated in an economic experiment as
“If housing tends to lead economic recoveries, then we’re in trouble. This marks the worst post-recession home-buying market since the Great Depression. Nobel laureate Professor Vernon L. Smith, who delivered the keynote address at the Cato Institute’s 30th Annual Monetary Conference on Nov. 15, noted how housing leads both recession and recoveries.” Read the full
Dec. 7th, Quazi Shahriar, Ph.D. – When Does Cheap-Talk (Fail to) Increase Efficient Coordination? Abstract: Can cheap-talk always help achieve maximum efficiency in situations that require coordination? Utilizing a class of two-person two-action coordination games, we show experimentally that cheap-talk may or may not be informative, rending it helpful for or detrimental to efficiency (relative
Nov. 30th, Chew Soo Hong, Ph.D. – How does familiarity breed investment? Abstract: In his 1921 Treatise on Probability, John Maynard Keynes offered a striking hypothesis about decision making under uncertainty: “… if two probabilities are equal in degree, ought we, in choosing our course of action, to prefer that one which is based on
Nov. 9th, Uri Gneezy, Ph.D.– Incentives and Behavior Change Abstract: Economists often emphasize that “incentives matter.” The basic “law of behavior” is that higher incentives will lead to more effort and higher performance. Employers, for example, often use extrinsic incentives to motivate their employees. In recent years, the use of incentives in behavioral interventions has
Nov. 2nd, Glenn Harrison, Ph.D. – Asset Integration and Attitudes to Risk Abstract: Measures of risk attitudes derived from experiments are often questioned because they are based on small stakes bets and do not account for the extent to which the decision-maker integrates the prizes of the experimental tasks with personal wealth. We exploit the