Publications:
Redesigning the Market for Volunteers: A Donor Registry (with Robert Slonim, Ellen Garbarino, Carmen Wang and Daniel Waller) [pdf][supplemental material]
Accepted at Management Science.
This paper addresses volunteer labor markets where the lack of price signals, non-pecuniary motivations to supply labor, and limited fungibility of supply lead to market failure. To address the causes of the market failure, we conduct a natural field experiment with volunteer whole blood donors where we introduce a market-clearing mechanism (henceforth: the Registry). Our intention-to-treat estimates suggest that subjects assigned to the Registry condition are 18-30% more likely to volunteer and are 50% more responsive to critical shortage appeals than control subjects. Thus, the Registry significantly improves coordination between volunteer donors and collection centers, thereby improving market outcomes. We find evidence that the Registry's effectiveness stems from crowding-in volunteers with purely altruistic motives and volunteers with a preference for commitment.
We Should Totally Open a Restaurant: How Optimism and Overconfidence Affect Beliefs (with Nicholas W. Papageorge) [pdf] [online appendix]
Journal of Economic Psychology (2018), 67, 177-190.
Wishful thinking, defined as the tendency to over-estimate the probability of high-payoff outcomes, is a widely-documented phenomenon that can affect decision-making across numerous domains, including finance, management, and entrepreneurship. We design an experiment to distinguish and test the relationship between two easily-confounded biases, optimism and overconfidence, both of which can contribute to wishful thinking. We find that optimism and overconfidence are positively correlated at the individual level and that both help to explain wishful thinking. These findings suggest that ignoring optimism results in an upwardly biased estimate of the role of overconfidence in explaining wishful thinking. To illustrate this point, we show that 30% of our observations are misclassified as under- or over-confident if optimism is omitted from the analysis. Our findings have potential implications for the design of information interventions since how agents incorporate information depends on whether the bias is ego-related.
Waiting To Give: Stated and Revealed Preferences (with Ashley Craig, Ellen Garbarino and Robert Slonim) [pdf] [supplementary material]
Management Science 63.11 (2017): 3672-3690.
We estimate and compare the effect of increased time costs on consumer satisfaction and behavior. We are able to move beyond the existing literature, which focuses on satisfaction and intention, and estimate the effect of waiting time on return behavior. Further, we do so in a prosocial context and our measure of cost is the length of time a blood donor spends waiting. We find that relying on satisfaction data masks important time cost sensitivities; namely, it is not how the donor feels about the wait time that matters for return behavior, but rather the actual duration of the wait. Consistent with theory we develop, our results indicate that waiting has a significant longer-term social cost: we estimate that a 38% increase (equivalent to one standard deviation) in the average wait would result in a 10% decrease in donations per year.
Working Papers:
Altruism or Diminishing Marginal Utility? (with Romain Gauriot & Robert Slonim) [pdf]
Submitted.
We challenge a commonly used assumption in the literature on social preferences and show that this assumption leads to significantly biased estimates of the social preference parameter. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that the literature's common restrictions on the curvature of the decision-makers utility function can dramatically bias the altruism parameter. We show that this is particularly problematic when comparing altruism between groups with well-documented differences in risk aversion or diminishing marginal utility, i.e., men versus women, giving motivated by pure versus warm glow motives, and wealthy versus poor.
The Innovative Personality (with Barton Hamilton) [pdf]
Submitted.
We consider the joint role of individual traits and information/experience in driving innovative behavior. Using a laboratory experiment, we are able to disentangle the role of traits on information demand versus directly on innovation. We find no evidence that individual traits unambiguously drive innovative behavior. Instead, we find evidence of a trait-based comparative advantage; that is, certain traits are assets when paired with some forms of information, but liabilities with others. Further, individuals optimally leverage their trait-based advantage when demanding information. Our results have implications for how we study the role of individual traits in labor markets, particularly entrepreneurship, with various sectors.
Altruism begets altruism: Nudging our way to a more virtuous society? (with Robert Slonim)
Researchers have long been interested in how to increase the amount of money or time individuals give to charity, cooperative behavior among individuals and contributions to public goods. However, theories of moral licensing suggest that increases in virtuous acts ``today" are likely to be followed by an increase in immoral acts ``tomorrow", rendering the gains to society ambiguous. On the other hand, theories of moral consistency predict the opposite. Using a popular policy nudge, the default option, we show that an exogenous increase in altruism ``today" causes an increase in altruism ``tomorrow". Consistent with a model of habit formation and moral consistency, our local average treatment effect indicates that the nudge-induced giving in round 1 of the experiment causes a 40 percentage point (or 200%) increase in the propensity to give in round 2. Our findings suggest a way forward in promoting a more pro-social society.
In Progress:
Vice-Virtue Bundles: Substitution and non-Substitution Effects
Parents' Investments in Children and Children's Investment in Themselves (with Robert A. Pollak)
Redesigning the Market for Volunteers: A Donor Registry (with Robert Slonim, Ellen Garbarino, Carmen Wang and Daniel Waller) [pdf][supplemental material]
Accepted at Management Science.
This paper addresses volunteer labor markets where the lack of price signals, non-pecuniary motivations to supply labor, and limited fungibility of supply lead to market failure. To address the causes of the market failure, we conduct a natural field experiment with volunteer whole blood donors where we introduce a market-clearing mechanism (henceforth: the Registry). Our intention-to-treat estimates suggest that subjects assigned to the Registry condition are 18-30% more likely to volunteer and are 50% more responsive to critical shortage appeals than control subjects. Thus, the Registry significantly improves coordination between volunteer donors and collection centers, thereby improving market outcomes. We find evidence that the Registry's effectiveness stems from crowding-in volunteers with purely altruistic motives and volunteers with a preference for commitment.
We Should Totally Open a Restaurant: How Optimism and Overconfidence Affect Beliefs (with Nicholas W. Papageorge) [pdf] [online appendix]
Journal of Economic Psychology (2018), 67, 177-190.
Wishful thinking, defined as the tendency to over-estimate the probability of high-payoff outcomes, is a widely-documented phenomenon that can affect decision-making across numerous domains, including finance, management, and entrepreneurship. We design an experiment to distinguish and test the relationship between two easily-confounded biases, optimism and overconfidence, both of which can contribute to wishful thinking. We find that optimism and overconfidence are positively correlated at the individual level and that both help to explain wishful thinking. These findings suggest that ignoring optimism results in an upwardly biased estimate of the role of overconfidence in explaining wishful thinking. To illustrate this point, we show that 30% of our observations are misclassified as under- or over-confident if optimism is omitted from the analysis. Our findings have potential implications for the design of information interventions since how agents incorporate information depends on whether the bias is ego-related.
Waiting To Give: Stated and Revealed Preferences (with Ashley Craig, Ellen Garbarino and Robert Slonim) [pdf] [supplementary material]
Management Science 63.11 (2017): 3672-3690.
We estimate and compare the effect of increased time costs on consumer satisfaction and behavior. We are able to move beyond the existing literature, which focuses on satisfaction and intention, and estimate the effect of waiting time on return behavior. Further, we do so in a prosocial context and our measure of cost is the length of time a blood donor spends waiting. We find that relying on satisfaction data masks important time cost sensitivities; namely, it is not how the donor feels about the wait time that matters for return behavior, but rather the actual duration of the wait. Consistent with theory we develop, our results indicate that waiting has a significant longer-term social cost: we estimate that a 38% increase (equivalent to one standard deviation) in the average wait would result in a 10% decrease in donations per year.
Working Papers:
Altruism or Diminishing Marginal Utility? (with Romain Gauriot & Robert Slonim) [pdf]
Submitted.
We challenge a commonly used assumption in the literature on social preferences and show that this assumption leads to significantly biased estimates of the social preference parameter. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that the literature's common restrictions on the curvature of the decision-makers utility function can dramatically bias the altruism parameter. We show that this is particularly problematic when comparing altruism between groups with well-documented differences in risk aversion or diminishing marginal utility, i.e., men versus women, giving motivated by pure versus warm glow motives, and wealthy versus poor.
The Innovative Personality (with Barton Hamilton) [pdf]
Submitted.
We consider the joint role of individual traits and information/experience in driving innovative behavior. Using a laboratory experiment, we are able to disentangle the role of traits on information demand versus directly on innovation. We find no evidence that individual traits unambiguously drive innovative behavior. Instead, we find evidence of a trait-based comparative advantage; that is, certain traits are assets when paired with some forms of information, but liabilities with others. Further, individuals optimally leverage their trait-based advantage when demanding information. Our results have implications for how we study the role of individual traits in labor markets, particularly entrepreneurship, with various sectors.
Altruism begets altruism: Nudging our way to a more virtuous society? (with Robert Slonim)
Researchers have long been interested in how to increase the amount of money or time individuals give to charity, cooperative behavior among individuals and contributions to public goods. However, theories of moral licensing suggest that increases in virtuous acts ``today" are likely to be followed by an increase in immoral acts ``tomorrow", rendering the gains to society ambiguous. On the other hand, theories of moral consistency predict the opposite. Using a popular policy nudge, the default option, we show that an exogenous increase in altruism ``today" causes an increase in altruism ``tomorrow". Consistent with a model of habit formation and moral consistency, our local average treatment effect indicates that the nudge-induced giving in round 1 of the experiment causes a 40 percentage point (or 200%) increase in the propensity to give in round 2. Our findings suggest a way forward in promoting a more pro-social society.
In Progress:
Vice-Virtue Bundles: Substitution and non-Substitution Effects
Parents' Investments in Children and Children's Investment in Themselves (with Robert A. Pollak)
