In this episode, we talk with Yan Chen about her working paper "Social Media and Job Market Success: A Field Experiment on Twitter," coauthored with Jingyi Qiu, Alan Cohn, and Alvin Roth. The paper investigates the impact of social media promotion on job market outcomes by studying how quote-tweets from prominent economists affect the visibility of job market papers and the success of job candidates. We discuss the challenges of running such a field experiment and reflect on broader issues, including the gender gap in economics.

In this episode, we dive into the study "The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income" with one of its authors, Eva Vivalt. Join us as Eva takes us behind the scenes of an ambitious experiment giving unconditional income to low-income individuals in two U.S. states. She discusses some surprising results and shares what it takes to build the relationships and infrastructure needed for large-scale research — including unexpected tasks such as creating a personal handwriting font.

In this episode, we speak with Marie-Claire Villeval about her paper, "Unethical Amnesia Responds More to Instrumental Than to Hedonic Motives," co-authored with Fabio Galeotti and Charlotte Saucet. The research investigates whether memory lapses after lying are more commonly driven by hedonic motives—such as preserving one's moral self-image—or by instrumental motives, like anticipating future dishonest behaviour. During our conversation, we delve into the nuances of studying moral decision-making and lying, the critical role of piloting and experimentation in developing a robust research design, and Marie-Claire’s insights on cultivating innovative research ideas.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.  

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.   

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.

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.  

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. 

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. 

In this episode, we talk to Pietro Biroli from the University of Bologna about his paper ”Moral Hazard Heterogeneity: Genes and Health Insurance Influence Smoking after a Health Shock”. In this paper, Pietro and his co-author Laura Zwyssig show that individual behaviour is influenced not only by environmental constraints but also by genetic makeup, which carries implications for the fairness and effectiveness of health policies.

In this episode, we talk to Katy Milkman from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania about some of the research that led to the production of her recent book, How to Change. Throughout this conversation, Katy shares with us what she has learned from her many years of experience as a behavioural science researcher and where she might go next to tackle the challenge that preoccupies her the most: changing behaviour for good.

In this episode we talk to Daniel Gottlieb from LSE about his paper Lapse-Based Insurance . In this paper Daniel studies why customers lapse on their life insurance payments and how this is related to insurance pricing using both a theoretical model and a survey data.

In this episode, we talk with Itzhak Gilboa, professor of Economics at the HEC Paris and Tel-Aviv University, and holder of the AXA Chair in Decision Sciences. We will talk about the contrast “expected vs. actual success” of two of his papers. “Case-Based Decision Theory” was expected to be very successful, but turned out not to be. The second paper, “Maxmin Expected Utility with Non-Unique Prior” was not expected to be a big deal, but is now listed as the most cited and the most relevant paper in the Journal of Mathematical Economics. Tune in for a discussion centered around the development of the ideas, the publication process, and to learn about axiomatic decision theory.

In this episode we talk to Aurélien Baillon from Erasmus University Rotterdam about his papers Bayesian Markets to Elicit Private Information  and Simple Bets to Elicit Private Signals. In this work Aurélien studies how we can elicit private information about questions for which we cannot verify if the subject responds truthfully, such as her subjective belief about whether she liked a product.

In this episode, we have a power couple joining us. We talk with Aislinn Bohren from the University of Pennsylvania and Alex Imas from the Chicago Booth School of Business about their joint paper “The Dynamics of Discrimination: Theory and Evidence", co-authored with Michael Rosenberg. They conduct a natural field experiment to identify the dynamics of discrimination and its underlying source. The authors post content on a large online platform and exogenously vary the gender and evaluation histories of the associated accounts. When no evaluation history is available, questions posted to female accounts earn less reputation than questions posted to male accounts. However, the direction of discrimination reverses as more reputation is built. When content is posted to advanced accounts, women’s posts are favoured over men’s. Tune in for a discussion centered around the idea, the design, and the logistical implementation of the paper that has won the 2020 Exeter prize.

In this episode, which forms part of a series on ethics in behavioural science research, we talk with Sandro Ambuehl from the University of Zürich about his paper “An Offer You Can’t Refuse? Incentives Change How We Inform Ourselves and What We Believe”. To investigate how economic incentives may skew information gathering and beliefs about what a transaction entails, thus affecting the quality of decisions taken by subjects, he presents a model of costly information acquisition in conjunction with behavioural experiments, one of which includes the ingestion of insects in exchange for money. Tune in for a discussion centred around the project’s design, its ethical and logistical considerations, and on the ethics of incentivising subjects in economic experiments more generally.