"Mispredicting Tastes: Evidences, Models, and Implications"
Research Seminar
Professor Matthew Rabin, University Of California, Berkeley
Date:
8 February 2012 (Wednesday)
Time and Venue:
1030-1200pm Seminar Room 5-4, Level 5 Moctar Riady Building
“People exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes. Professor Rabin provides evidence for the existence of such a bias in predicting tastes, presents a simple formal model of the bias used by economists, and discusses some of its implications.”
"The Promise and Pitfalls of Genoeconomics"
Research Seminar
Dr. Daniel Benjamin, Cornell University
Date:
14 February 2012 (Tuesday)
Time and Venue:
4-530pm Economics Seminar Room, AS2/03-12
“I will review existing research at the intersection of genetics and economics, relates some of my own experiences, present some new findings, and survey the prospects of this emerging field. Twin studies imply that economic outcomes and preferences appear to be about as heritable as many physical and psychological traits, once measurement error is accounted for. Turning from traditional twin studies to modern genetic association studies, I will overview what I see as the main ways that direct measurement of genetic variation across individuals is likely to contribute to economics, and I will outline the challenges that have slowed progress in realizing these contributions. The most urgent problem facing researchers in this field is that most existing studies using genetic data are dramatically underpowered, leading to a large fraction of false positives in the set of published associations. I will suggest a number of possible strategies for improving power and remedying this problem: (i) pooling datasets; (ii) using statistical techniques that examine the joint effects of genes on outcomes; and (iii) measuring more biologically proximate traits.”
"Rational and Naive Herding"
Research Seminar
Professor Matthew Rabin, University Of California, Berkeley
Date:
23 February 2012 (Thursday)
Time and Venue:
4-530pm Economics Seminar Room, AS2/03-12
“An extensive literature identifies how privately-informed rational people who observe the behavior of other privately-informed rational people with similar tastes may come to imitate those people, emphasizing when and how such imitation leads to inefficiency. Professor Rabin will discuss research investigating not the efficiency but instead the behavior of fully rational observational learners. In virtually any setting apart from that most commonly studied in the literature, rational observational learners imitate only some of their predecessors and, in fact, frequently contradict both their private information and the prevailing beliefs that they observe. Necessary and sufficient conditions for rational observational learning to include "anti-imitative" behavior are discussed: fixing other observed actions, a person regards a state of the world as less likely the more a predecessor's action indicates belief in that state. Both the behavioral and efficiency implications of pure rationality will be contrasted with a simple model of naive herding that predicts more universal imitation and more universal inefficiencies.”