Argyros College News

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

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