Monday, May 2018
Thursday, August 2018
Young Economists Symposium (YES)
WHAT IS YES?
The Young Economists Symposium (YES) is an annual student-run conference for Economics PhD students. Known in the past as EconCon, it is sponsored by a group of five East Coast schools – Columbia, NYU, UPenn, Princeton and Yale. There will be two days of academic talks and discussions as well as several social events. Its purpose is to give students an opportunity to present their work to a diverse and unfamiliar audience of students from other schools and receive feedback.
This year’s conference will take place on August 9th and 10th at New York University. We hope the conference will be particularly appealing to those looking to go on the job market next year, but we welcome submissions from students at all stages of research who would benefit from presenting their work. Past presenters have gone on to tenure-track economics jobs at Harvard, Chicago, Yale, NYU, Michigan, Duke, Maryland, and many others. Last year we received about 150 submissions, and the best 30 papers were selected for presentation by a panel of PhD students.
Find out more »Thursday, September 2018
Colin Camerer – “Using Visual Saliency in Game Theory”
We measure and study visual salience in two-player games, in which players both prefer to match choices of locations or one prefers match and the other mismatch (hide-and-seek). Visual salience is predicted a priori from a computational algorithm based on principles from theoretical neuroscience and previously calibrated by human free gaze data. Salience is a strong predictor of choices, which results in a matching rate of 64% in two samples. Both seekers and hiders choose salient locations more often, though seekers also choose low-salience locations. The result is a “seeker’s advantage” in which seekers win about 9% of the games, compared to a mixed-Nash benchmark of 7%. A salience-perturbed cognitive hierarchy (SCH) model is estimated from the hide-and-seek data. Those estimated parameters accurately predict the choice-salience relation in the matching games.
Find out more »Thursday, November 2018
Pietro Ortoleva, “Econographics”
Decades of research in economics and psychology has identified a large number of behavioral regularities—specific patterns of behavior present in the choices of a large fraction of decision makers, such as the endowment effect, ambiguity aversion, or altruism—that run counter to the standard rational model of economic decision-making. However, these regularities are often studied in isolation, and their theoretical or empirical relationship is rarely discussed. In this paper, we study the pattern of correlations across a large number of behavioral…
Find out more »Tom Griffiths, “Resource-rational models of decision-making”
Anybody trying to understand human decision-making faces a challenge: the two dominant perspectives on how human minds work are fundamentally at odds with one another. The classic approach of assuming that people are rational agents has the advantage of making it possible to derive generalizable models for any new circumstance, but has been shown to give a poor characterization of actual human behavior. By contrast, the “heuristics and biases” perspective that has replaced it provides explanations for the ways in…
Find out more »
1022 International Affairs Building (IAB)
Mail Code 3308
420 West 118th Street
New York, NY 10027