davetannenbaum

7 ms·

1.
by davetannenbaum 2y ago
His own work held up very well to replication. It's when he is citing the work of other scholars (in particular, that of social psychologists) that doesn't hold up well to replication.
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by davetannenbaum 3y ago
Yup, completely agree. I think research practices (and incentives for sound research practices) are starting to tilt in the right direction, though perhaps at a slower pace than I'd like.
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by davetannenbaum 3y ago
As someone working in this space, I largely agree with your take. I'll only add that compared to, say, traditional economics we don't have a sense of how unique the problem is to social psych/organizational behavior. In the p
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by davetannenbaum 3y ago
Most of Kahneman's own work has held up quite well to replication, and that makes up a large portion of the book. But a lot of the social psych findings he discusses have not fared well to replication attempts.
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by davetannenbaum 3y ago
We tested both ideas (altruism and theft aversion) in the paper. Short answer is we find evidence for both. For somewhat technical reasons, we think the "viewing oneself as a thief" component is probably necessary in order to obse
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by davetannenbaum 3y ago
It's a fair point, but we've tried to test this issue in a number of different ways. Based on the available data, cross country differences in email usage doesn't seem to have a meaningful impact on our results. See my commen
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by davetannenbaum 3y ago
A valid concern, but a couple points: (1) This issue doesn't affect the treatment effect (the difference in return rates for money vs no money), which was the main focus of the paper. If email usage is low in a particular country, that
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by davetannenbaum 3y ago
Actually one of our research assistants was temporarily detained (in Kenya, I believe) for suspicious activity. As you can imagine, having a bunch of "lost" wallets on hand required some explaining.
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by davetannenbaum 3y ago
Definitely a concern. We took steps to examine if there were specific "experimenter effects", that is whether response rates were affected by one research assistant rather than another, and don't find evidence that was a fact
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by davetannenbaum 3y ago
One of the study authors here. On targeting front-desk employees, we did this both to allow relatively portable cross-country comparisons and for reasons of internal validity (e.g., if we placed wallets on the ground, then can participants
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by davetannenbaum 5y ago
She never taught at Cal State Fullerton. Here is her CV: https://ucirvine-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/eloftus_ad...
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by davetannenbaum 6y ago
My understanding is that there have also been semi-recent replications done in France, Iran, and a partial replication conducted at Santa Clara university. All found the same basic pattern as the original study.
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by davetannenbaum 6y ago
Right --- it's called block randomization.
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by davetannenbaum 6y ago
Ted Chiang is fantastic. Good podcast discussion of this story: https://overcast.fm/+HV3dvbFhA
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by davetannenbaum 7y ago
Definitely a fair criticism. In the paper we test for experimenter effects (are the results different for male vs female research assistants? Are some researcher assistants acting differently in a way that might bias the results?) and do no
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by davetannenbaum 7y ago
Cost was about US $600K in total.
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by davetannenbaum 7y ago
Absolutely. We thought a lot about this trade-off when designing the study. The disadvantage of using a clear business-card case over a traditional wallet is clear, in that it is relatively unusual. The advantage of using a clear case, howe
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by davetannenbaum 7y ago
Thanks for your comments. 1. This is a fair point. In the Supplemental Material, we explore cross-country differences in email usage. When we statistically adjust for country-level differences in email usage (using World Bank data), the cou
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by davetannenbaum 7y ago
Many thanks. Yes, we only went back for those who contacted us first. Your idea is an interesting one, but it gets at something else (how many people, who otherwise would keep the wallet, instead would turn over the wallet when confronted b
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by davetannenbaum 7y ago
We originally planned to include Japan but after some initial pilot testing we realized that the country was unsuitable for methodological reasons. Japan has a lot of small “police booths” where people can return lost objects. During our pi
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by davetannenbaum 7y ago
Quick clarification: we did adjust for purchasing power parity across countries (but not within countries). As you surmised, even for differences between cities like SF and Fresno, the PPP adjustments would be negligible for the wallet amou
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by davetannenbaum 7y ago
Thanks for your comments (I'm one of the authors on this paper). For a subset of the countries, we went back to retrieve the wallets (logistically, collecting the wallets turned out to be extremely difficult, which is why we didn'
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by davetannenbaum 8y ago
Interesting how their review omits the paper that has conducted the most direct test of loss aversion: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.1070.071... Also they claim the body of evidence doe
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by davetannenbaum 14y ago
The reason why it is usually considered irrational/illogical is because hyperbolic discounting leads to dynamically inconsistent preferences. For example, under hyperbolic discounting I may prefer $100 today to $150 in one month, but prefer