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
Oct. 26th, Michael Baye, Ph.D. – Product Search Online Bio: Michael Baye is the Bert Elwert Professor of Business at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. He served as the Director of the Bureau of Economics at the US Federal Trade Commission during 2007 and 2008. Professor Baye has won numerous awards for his outstanding
Oct. 19th, John Morgan, Ph.D. – On the Merits of Meritocracy Abstract: We study career choice when competition for promotion is a contest. A more meritocratic profession always succeeds in attracting the highest ability types, whereas a profession with superior promotion benefits attracts high types only if the hazard rate of the noise in performance
Oct. 12th, Jonathan Meer, Ph.D.– An Experimental Analysis of Charitable Donations of Time and Money Abstract: We conduct a laboratory experiment to test if there are differences in behavior when subjects can donate either time or money to charity. Our subjects perform an effort task to earn money. In one treatment they can have their
Oct. 5th, Joshua Tasoff, Ph.D. – Exponential-Growth Bias and Lifecycle Consumption. Abstract: Exponential-growth bias (EGB) is the tendency for individuals to underestimate exponential growth to the neglect of the role of compounding. We develop a theoretical model in which EGB causes consumers to mis-perceive the budget constraint. Because consumers dynamically mis-perceive prices, consumers will over-consume
Professor Vernon Smith, 2002 Nobel laureate in economics, is in Chile this week and will receive an extraordinary honor – he will be appointed an Honorary Fellow at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, a private institution in Valparaiso, “for his seminal contributions on experimental economics and liberal thinking,” the university has announced. Read full article in
Sept. 28th, Charles Thomas, Ph.D. – An Alternating-Offers Model of Multilateral Negotiations Abstract: I modify a standard infinite-horizon alternating-offers model of bilateral negotiations to analyze multilateral negotiations, an exchange process in which a buyer attempts to purchase from one of several sellers offering potentially different amounts of surplus to be split. Rival sellers constrain the
September 24th, the New York Times featured “In Bolivian Amazon, a Yardstick for Modern Health” discussing the Tsimane Health and Life History Project, which Dr. Hillard Kaplan, an affiliate of the Economic Science Institute (ESI), and Dr. Eric Schniter, a Post Doctoral Research Associate Professor with ESI are both involved with. ESI’s Dr. Nathaniel Wilcox,
Sept. 21st, David Stephens, Ph.D. – The Natural History of Acquisition: Evolution, foraging, impulsiveness and behavioral plasticity. Further reading for this lecture. Abstract: The animals, including humans, descend from an ancient lineage of resource acquiring organisms: i.e. foragers. This talk will focus on how this evolutionary history has shaped the mechanisms of decision-making. The talk
Sept. 7th, Gary Charness, Ph.D. – Experimental Games on Networks Abstract: We study behavior and equilibrium selection in experimental network games. We vary two important factors: (a) actions are either strategic substitutes or strategic complements, and (b) subjects have either complete or incomplete information about the structure of a random network. Play conforms strongly to
Aug. 31st, Yan Chen, Ph.D. – Crowdsourcing with All-pay Auctions: a Field Experiment on Taskcn Abstract:To understand the effects of incentives on crowdsourcing participation and submission quality, we conduct a field experiment on Taskcn, a large Chinese crowdsourcing site using all-pay auction mechanisms. We systematically vary the size of the reward, and the presence of
Chapman University professor and the 2002 Nobel laureate in economics, Vernon L. Smith, Ph.D., will be present for the first week of a workshop for high school students, gathering from from all over the nation, at Chapman from June 25-29. His namesake Vernon L. Smith High School Workshop in Experimental Economics will then continue for a second session, July 2-3 and 5-6, with another group