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A statistical decision rule is a mapping from data to actions induced by statistical inference on the data. We characterize these rules for data that are chosen strategically in persuasion environments. A designer wishes to persuade a decision maker (DM) to take a particular action and decides how many Bernoulli experiments about a parameter of interest the DM can obtain. After obtaining these data and estimating the parameter value, the DM chooses to take the action if the estimated value exceeds some threshold. We establish that as the threshold changes, the resulting statistical decision rules in many environments are either simple majority or reverse unanimity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In type 1 diabetes, it is important to prevent diabetes‐related complications and postural instability may be one clinically observable manifestation early on. This study was set to investigate differences between type 1 diabetics and healthy controls in variables of instrumented posturography assessment to inform about the potential of the assessment in early detection of diabetes‐related complications. Eighteen type 1 diabetics with no apparent complications (HbA1c = 58 ± 9 mmol/L, diabetes duration = 15 ± 7 years) and 35 healthy controls underwent six 1‐min two feet standing postural stability tests on a force plate. Study groups were comparable in age and anthropometric and performed the test with eyes open, eyes closed (EC), and EC head up with and without unstable padding. Type 1 diabetics exhibited greater sway (path length, p = 0.044 and standard deviation of velocity, p = 0.039) during the EC test with the unstable pad. Also, power spectral density indicated greater relative power (p = 0.043) in the high‐frequency band in the test with EC head up on the unstable pad and somatosensory activity increased more (p = 0.038) when the unstable pad was added to the EC test. Type 1 diabetes may induce subtle changes in postural control requiring more active balancing when stability is challenged. Postural assessment using a portable easy‐to‐use force plate shows promise in detecting a diabetes‐related decline in postural control that may be used as a sensitive biomarker of early‐phase diabetes‐related complications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust in institutions is important for economic prosperity. We present results from a field study where we compare stated trust in institutions in general, stated trust in employees at institutions, and amount sent to employees at institutions using a trust game. Including more than 250 entrepreneurs in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, we examine levels of trust towards entrepreneurship development agency, district administration, tax authority, and electric utility. There is a positive and sizeable significant correlation between stated trust and trust game. Furthermore, we find that generalized trust is weakly correlated with trust in specific institutions both compared with stated trust, and trust game. Given the large heterogeneity in levels of trust to specific institutions, we argue it is important to elicit institution-specific levels of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study whether a better knowledge of the functioning of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension systems and recent demographic trends affects natives' attitudes toward immigration. In two online experiments conducted in Italy and Spain, we randomly treated participants with a video explaining how, in PAYG systems, the payment of current pensions depends on the contributions paid by current workers. The video also informs participants about population aging trends in their countries. The treatment increases knowledge of PAYG systems and future demographic trends for all participants. However, it improves attitudes toward migrants only for treated participants who do not support populist and anti-immigrant parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study incentive schemes that combine self-chosen goals with prosocial rewards. We design a real-effort task experiment with MTurk workers. Upon achieving self-chosen goals, rewards are paid to the worker in the monetary treatments or to charities in the prosocial treatments. To explore the mechanisms whereby rewards can improve performance with prosocial incentives, we develop a theoretical model with goal dependence and earning reference points. Our results show that when rewards are paid to charities, performance improvements happen through workers setting higher goals. This effect is stronger for those whose interests are matched with the charity's mission. Our findings have important implications for incentivizing workers in the gig economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of personality and experience on the success of venture capitalists. The study finds that the personal qualities of venture capitalists, such as knowledge, experience, and personal networks, play a role in the success of the companies they invest in. The research collected data from surveys distributed to venture capitalists in the United States and analyzed the relationship between investor characteristics and investment returns. The findings suggest that specialized knowledge, experience in early and growing markets, a high pain tolerance, and a long-term outlook are key factors in the success of top venture capitalists. [Extracted from the article]

The rise of opinion programs has transformed television news. Because they present anchors' subjective commentary and analysis, opinion programs often convey conflicting narratives about reality. We experimentally document that people across the ideological spectrum turn to opinion programs over "straight news", even when provided large incentives to learn objective facts. We then examine the consequences of diverging narratives between opinion programs in a high-stakes setting: the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. We find stark differences in the adoption of preventative behaviours among viewers of the two most popular opinion programs, both on the same network, which adopted opposing narratives about the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. We then show that areas with greater relative viewership of the program downplaying the threat experienced a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Our evidence suggests that opinion programs may distort important beliefs and behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing travel speed below the highway speed limit leads to savings in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. However, car drivers may be reluctant to drive more slowly either because they do not want to lose time or for other reasons we refer to as ‘the disutility of driving at lower speeds’. In this paper, we use a survey experiment to isolate the disutility of driving at lower speeds by comparing drivers’ willingness to accept compensation for a fixed increase in travel time caused either by taking a longer route or by travelling at below-limit speeds. We show that Czech drivers require higher compensation for travelling at lower speeds than they require for the same travel time increment caused by a longer distance. This result represents the first piece of evidence showing that the disutility of driving at below-limit speeds on a highway is substantial and economically relevant.

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) sometimes test interventions that aim to improve existing services targeted to a subset of individuals identified after randomization. Accordingly, the treatment could affect the composition of service recipients and the offered services. With such bias, intention-to-treat estimates using data on service recipients and nonrecipients may be difficult to interpret. This article develops causal estimands and inverse probability weighting (IPW) estimators for complier populations in these settings, using a generalized estimating equation approach that adjusts the standard errors for estimation error in the IPW weights. While our focus is on more general clustered RCTs, the methods also apply (reduce) to nonclustered RCTs. Simulations show that the estimators achieve nominal confidence interval coverage under the assumed identification conditions. An empirical application demonstrates the methods using data from a large-scale RCT testing the effects of early childhood services on children’s cognitive development scores. An R program for estimation is available for download.

The random utility model (RUM, McFadden and Richter (1990)) has been the standard tool to describe the behavior of a population of decision makers. RUM assumes that decision makers behave as if they maximize a rational preference over a choice set. This assumption may fail when consideration of all alternatives is costly. We provide a theoretical and statistical framework that unifies well‐known models of random (limited) consideration and generalizes them to allow for preference heterogeneity. We apply this methodology in a novel stochastic choice data set that we collected in a large‐scale online experiment. Our data set is unique since it exhibits both choice set and (attention) frame variation. We run a statistical survival race between competing models of random consideration and RUM. We find that RUM cannot explain the population behavior. In contrast, we cannot reject the hypothesis that decision makers behave according to the logit attention model (Brady and Rehbeck (2016)). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statisticians and data scientists transform raw data into understanding and insight. Ideally, these insights empower people to act and make better decisions. However, data is often misleading especially when trying to draw conclusions about causality (for example, Simpson's paradox). Therefore, developing causal thinking in undergraduate statistics and data science programs is important. However, there is very little guidance in the education literature about what topics and learning outcomes, specific to causality, are most important. In this paper, we propose a causality curriculum for undergraduate statistics and data science programs. Students should be able to think causally, which is defined as a broad pattern of thinking that enables individuals to appropriately assess claims of causality based upon statistical evidence. They should understand how the data generating process affects their conclusions and how to incorporate knowledge from subject matter experts in areas of application. Important topics in causality for the undergraduate curriculum include the potential outcomes framework and counterfactuals, measures of association versus causal effects, confounding, causal diagrams, and methods for estimating causal effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If welfare stigma depends upon social attitudes, only the neediest apply for welfare when they can more easily be seen to do so. Using GoogleMaps' 'StreetView' feature, this article finds that the approval rate of applications for social assistance is higher in welfare offices with building characteristics that enhance the visibility of entry. A fitting explanation for this finding is that persons looking for social assistance dislike being thought of as 'welfare cases', and apply more conservatively when others can see it. The effects decline in the rate of poverty, suggesting that the self-reliance norm weakens as poverty increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim/purpose – This study explores how the content feature and source of eWOM affect people’s intentions and further analyses the effectiveness of eWOM on people’s intention to watch movies.

There can be a serious tension between the commitment to cost-benefit analysis and a realistic appreciation of the limits of official knowledge. Without significant efforts to reduce those limits, that analysis might be inadequately informed. Whenever regulators face significant informational deficits, or what is sometimes called "the knowledge problem," it is important to explore tools that take advantage of what the private sector knows; market-friendly tools, such as economic incentives, have important advantages on that count. An advanced regulatory system should also try to reduce the knowledge problem through three routes: (i) creative use of notice-and-comment rulemaking; (ii) retrospective analysis of regulations and their costs and benefits; and (iii) advance testing, as a way of informing ex ante analysis. For the future, the most promising approach is (iii). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence shows that people have difficulty understanding complex aspects of retirement planning, which leads them to under-utilize annuities and claim Social Security benefits earlier than is optimal. To target this problem, we developed vignettes about the consequences of different annuitization and claiming decisions. We evaluated our vignettes using an experiment with a representative online panel of nearly 2,000 Americans. In our experiment, respondents were either assigned to a control group with no vignette, to a written vignette, or to a video vignette. They were then asked to give advice to hypothetical persons on annuitization or Social Security claiming, and were asked factual questions about these concepts. We found evidence that being exposed to vignettes led respondents to give better advice. For example, the gap between advised claim age for a relatively healthy person versus a relatively sick person was larger by nearly a year in the vignette treatments than in the control group. Furthermore, the vignettes increased financial literacy related to these concepts by 10–15 percentage points. Interestingly, the mode of communication did not have a significant impact – the video and written vignettes were equally effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We elicited incentivized measures of risk and time preferences from a sample of undergraduate students in Athens, Greece, in waves that preceded and overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic. We exploited the timing of several events that occurred in the course of the pandemic (e.g., first occurrence of cases and deaths, curfew, relaxation of curfew etc.) and estimated structural parameters for various theories of risk and time preferences comparing these with pre-pandemic estimates. We find no effect between the different waves or other key events of the pandemic, despite the fact that we have about 1000 responses across all waves. Overall, our subjects exhibit intertemporal stability of risk and time preferences despite the significant effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on public health and the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of open ascending auctions is often attributed to the fact that openly observable bidding allows to aggregate dispersed information. Another reason behind the frequent utilization of open auction formats may be that they activate revenue enhancing biases. In an experiment, we compare three auctions that differ in how much information is revealed and in the potential activation of behavioral biases: (i) the ascending Vickrey auction, a closed format; and two open formats, (ii) the Japanese–English auction, and (iii) the Oral Outcry auction. Even though bidders react to information conveyed in others' bids, information aggregation fails in both open formats. In contrast, the Oral Outcry raises higher revenue than the other two formats by stimulating bidders to submit unprofitable jump bids and triggering a quasi‐endowment effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do product innovation messages delay purchase intentions? Few studies offer answers to this question. Building on the literature of regulatory focus and framing effects, this study aims to identify the mechanism of the relationships among product innovation contents (i.e., performance advancements and price drops), reference time points (i.e., in the past and in the near future), and purchase intentions. Three experiments are conducted in the contexts of electric vehicles (Experiments 1 and 2) and household solar panels (Experiment 3) in South Korea in 2018 and 2019. The results indicate that when prevention-oriented individuals are exposed to prevention-focused messages, as compared to promotion-focused messages, their intentions to purchase incumbent products are weaker. However, promotion-oriented individuals do not exhibit such differences in their purchase intentions. Further, when exposed to promotion-focused messages, promotion-oriented participants have higher purchase intentions when the message is framed as a gain rather than a non-gain. However, when they are exposed to prevention-focused messages, prevention-oriented participants have lower purchase intentions when the message is framed as a loss rather than a non-loss. This study enables the theoretical understanding of how and why consumers respond differently to product innovation messages. It also sheds light on how marketers must strategically manage the messages about innovation outcomes.

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