Over a decade ago when I started reading the behavioural economics literature, John List quickly became one of my favourite academics. Whenever I read an interview with List he always seemed to ask great, critical questions. He was rarely happy taking others’ assumptions as given. I saw him as someone who, on hearing “in my … Read more
When we analyse experimental data, we have many choices. What observations do we exclude? What variables do we compare? What statistical tests do we use? And so on. These choices lead us into what is often called the garden of forking paths. The problem is that some paths lead to a “significant” result. Hurrah! Publication … Read more
My first job out of university was as a lawyer. Later, when I switched to a non-legal role, I enrolled in a Master of Laws. I selected some subjects relevant to my new job and that might be useful if I wanted to return to a legal firm. Among other subjects, I studied constitutional theory, … Read more
Introduction This presentation started with a blog post. Around five years ago when I was ensconced in the corporate world, I wrote a couple of posts on an idea called ergodicity economics. A random physicist, Ole Peters, was riling people up on twitter about how economists were doing it wrong, how expected utility theory was … Read more
I first wrote a version of this post in April 2023. A lot has changed since then in both the tools and how I use them. As was the case then, if you want a sense of the frontier, others such as Ethan Mollick will give you a better flavour. But if you’re after some … Read more
In 2012, I wrote a post titled Chimps 1, Humans 0 after seeing videos of a chimp named Ayumu. Ayumu could recall the location of numbers, in order, flashed briefly on a screen. Ayumu’s performance far exceeded my feeble attempts. See the below videos to get a sense of the task. The human Ayumu This … Read more
From a recent Journal of Political Economy paper by Stefano DellaVigna, Woojin Kim and Elizabeth Linos (2024): We study 30 US cities that ran 73 RCTs with a national nudge unit. Cities adopt a nudge treatment into their communications in 27% of the cases. We find that the strength of the evidence and key city … Read more
Each year I teach an undergraduate subject in behavioural economics. I have pulled together the notes for the subject into a website, which you can find here. The notes include the subject content, plus “exercises” that form the basis for the tutorials. If you work through the content, you’re effectively getting the same content as … Read more
I wrote this post based on notes for a proposed “lunch and learn” session. Illness got in the way, so rather than let those notes sit on the shelf, I’ve cleaned them up to share here. Many points were intended to be (provocative) conversation prompts rather than statements, so a few parts are light on … Read more
If you ever read a claim of an AI outperforming a human, dig into the performance data to check out the human benchmark. The mediocrity of the human is often more salient than the competence of the AI. The AI has an easy job. Here’s an example from a paper by Ayers and friends (2023). … Read more