UW-Madison BRITE Lab News Blast 11/02/2018

Fall 2018 | Volume 22

BRITE Lab News Blast

A weekly publication from the UW-Madison BRITE Lab

Announcements, Reminders, & Upcoming Events

New procedure for BRITE Lab small grants this year. This year we have an open rolling application procedure without specific application deadlines. We encourage those who are interested in BRITE Lab small grants to contact BRITE Director Justin Sydnor with a short description of the study. Justin is happy to discuss preliminary ideas and he especially encourages graduate students or those newer to behavioral/experimental research to reach out at early stages of their study planning and conceptualization. You can find the full RFP for BRITE Lab small grants for the 2018-2019 here.

Contact Felix to book time in the lab or indicate an intention to book. We encourage you to reach out to Felix if you have any intention of running lab sessions during Fall 2018. Even if you are not yet ready to finalize session times, it will help us plan if we know that you might be requesting times later in the semester. Right now the lab is almost fully booked till the end of November. More openings are available in December. For more details, please check the calendar.

Send interesting things to Justin and/or Felix. If you see any papers, conferences, graduate student workshops, resources, etc... that might be of interest to the broader BRITE Lab community, please send along the info to Justin and Felix.

This Week in the Lab

~October 2018~

Joshua Foster , Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh, conducted a study designed to test the efficiency of various signaling mechanisms used to solve issues of asymmetric information in large online communities .

Many of the largest online communities that exist today rely on user-generated information to create value for other users. For example, online marketplaces rely on user-generated reviews to recommend products to other customers, and online social networking websites rely on user-generated ‘likes’ to populate other users’ news feeds. While these feedback mechanisms are designed and, in part, implemented to solve issues of asymmetric information via signaling, there is no evidence that demonstrates their efficiency. Moreover, communities employ a variety of signaling mechanisms that include differing levels of signal specificity. By exogenously imposing various signaling mechanisms to simulated user communities, Josh hopes to uncover which mechanisms can be expected to be relatively more efficient at sharing information with the broader community.

BRITE Ideas

This week we want to highlight the paper Global Evidence on Economic Preferences by Falk et al., which just came out in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

The paper reports on a very large cross-national study of economic preferences (e.g., risk, time, altruism). The data for this paper were also used in the Falk and Hermle study we highlighted in a recent BRITE Ideas post.

The key reason we want to highlight it here is that the data are available from the study and may provide some useful background information to BRITE studies.

Interested in booking research time in the Lab?

View available time on our Lab Calendar;

email requests to the Lab Manager, Felix Zhan

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Volume 22| November 2, 2018