Behavioural Science Uncovered

Designing Information Provision Experiments with Chris Roth

In this episode, we talk with Chris Roth from the University of Cologne about his paper "Designing Information Provision Experiments". In this paper, Chris and his co-authors review the literature on information provision experiments and derive best practices for designing such experiments. We also discuss determinants of research productivity.

The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work with Lise Vesterlund

In this episode, we talk with Lise Vesterlund about her book “The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work”, co-authored with Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, and Laurie Weingart. The book discusses how women are disproportionately assigned non-promotable tasks in the workplace and offers strategies for resisting these burdens to achieve more equitable professional advancement. Our interview focuses on why there is a gender difference in saying no in the workplace, as well as the process of publishing the book. 

Do Virtue Signals Signal Virtue? with Matt Lowe

In this episode, we talk with Matt Lowe about his randomised controlled trial, "Do Virtue Signals Signal Virtue?", co-authored with Deivis Angeli. The research examines whether tweets about racial justice predict real-life actions, finding that while people who tweet about racial justice are generally more likely to act in line with those values, the sincerity of these signals diminishes when social pressure to speak out is higher. Our interview focuses on his findings, as well as his experience running a large experiment that involved over 200 research assistants to sample more than 11,000 academics.

The Curious Culture of Economic Theory with Ran Spiegler

In this episode, we talk with Ran Spiegler about his book "The Curious Culture of Economic Theory". The book is a collection of essays about how the professional culture of economics shapes the way theory is done. Our interview focuses on Chapter 8, in which Ran describes the story behind his American Economic Review paper "Search Design and Broad Matching" co-authored with Kfir Eliaz. In this project, Ran and Kfir attempted to study a problem using an established but "unfashionable" modeling approach. Despite getting interesting results, they later rewrote the paper using the standard approach in the literature. Among other things, we discuss why they felt they had to do this and how the new design nudged them into asking certain questions they were originally not interested in.

Team incentives and escape rooms with Simeon Schudy

In this episode, we talk with Simeon Schudy about his working paper "The Effect of Incentives in Non-Routine Analytical Team Tasks", co-authored with Florian Englmaier, Stefan Grimm, Dominik Grothe and David Schindler (forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy). Using a novel experimental setup, escape rooms, this paper investigates the effect of incentives on performance in non-routine analytical team tasks. The paper studies the value of incentives for both intrinsically and less intrinsically motivated teams. Further, it evaluates how incentives affect team organization and studies the impact of exogenously varying the demand for leadership in such tasks.

The following reference was also mentioned during the conversation:

Englmaier, F., Grimm, S., Grothe, D., Schindler, D., and Schudy, S. (2021): "The Efficacy of Tournaments for Non-Routine Team Tasks", forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics.

 

Enabling or Limiting Cognitive Flexibility with Marta Serra-Garcia

In this episode, we talk with Marta Serra-Garcia Marta Serra-Garcia about her American Economic Review paper "Enabling or Limiting Cognitive Flexibility? Evidence of Demand for Moral Commitment," co-authored with Silvia Saccardo. This paper investigates the nature and flexibility of self-serving beliefs in decision environments where morals and personal incentives are in conflict. Through laboratory experiments, the authors distinguish participants who are willing to curb opportunities for self-serving beliefs, favouring moral behaviour, from those who seek the cognitive flexibility to entertain beliefs that can justify their selfish decisions.   

Cash Transfers & Psychotherapy with Johannes Haushofer

In this episode, we talk with Johannes Haushofer about his paper “The Comparative Impact of Cash Transfers and a Psychotherapy Program on Psychological and Economic Well-being” co-authored with Robert Mudida and Jeremy Shapiro. This paper explores the possible interactive or synergetic effects between cash transfers and a psychotherapy intervention in Kenya. We discuss the surprising results of this study, some of the biggest challenges and ethical considerations such as the collection of sensitive data and randomisation of cash transfers itself.

Social Learning with Ben Golub

In this episode, we talk with Ben Golub about his paper “Signaling, Shame, and Silence in Social Learning” co-authored with Arun Chandrasekhar and He Yang. This paper studies how signaling, and shame-related concerns can reduce social learning. Throughout the conversation, Ben also shares helpful pieces of advice for young researchers ranging from working on multiple projects to writing better.  

Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms with Shengwu Li

In this episode we talk with Shengwu Li about his paper Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms . In this paper Shengwu introduces the notion of an "obviously dominant strategies", which describes a strategy that is not only dominant but can also recognised as weakly dominant by an agent with cognitive limitations. 

Self Persuasion with Peter Schwardmann and Egon Tripodi

In this episode we talk with Peter Schwardmann and Egon Tripodi about their paper Self-Persuasion: Evidence from Field Experiments at International Debating Competitions. In this paper Peter and Egon study if people are more likely to believe in the veracity of a claim if it is convenient for them to do so.