UW-Madison BRITE Lab News Blast 09/21/2018

Fall 2018 | Volume 18

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. We once again have funding for BRITE Lab small grants this year, but have some small changes to the application procedure. This year we will have an open rolling application procedure without specific application deadlines. The goal is to help people better match funding requests to times when they are ready to actually run studies, and to allow faster turn-around times by having a smaller number of grants to review at a time. We encourage those who are interested in BRITE Lab small grants to first contact BRITE Director Justin Sydnor (justin.sydnor@wisc.edu) with a short description of the study you have in mind. Justin will then (likely) suggest a short meeting to discuss together so that he can give some initial feedback prior to the formal small-grant submission. 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 already have a number of studies scheduled to run during Fall 2018. Although we still have a good amount of room, we encourage you to reach out to Felix if you have any intention of running lab sessions during Fall 2018 because the schedule had filled up quickly over the past year. 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.

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

~September 2018~

Kevin Chung , Assistant Professor of Marketing is running a study in the lab.

In an expert review system where products are evaluated by raters, the rater’s incentive to provide objective feedback can be distorted in the presence of social ties and different penalty structures for unobjectivity. Utilizing an economics experiment, Kevin tries to understand the non-pecuniary factors that can influence behavior in expert review systems.

BRITE Ideas

We will use this space each week in the news blast for Justin to share new ideas he thinks may be of interest for our behavioral & experimental community. If you ever have ideas for topics, please share your ideas with Justin .

This Week's BRITE Idea:

For this week's BRITE ideas we want to highlight the issue of data quality on the Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform.

MTurk is a common platform for behavioral research and has a lot of advantages, including being fast, fairly low-cost and providing a more diverse respondent panel than traditional university labs. But the big problem is that the data quality can potentially be low. There are a lot of mixed results on the general quality of MTurk respondents, including some signs that you often can't get about the same quality on MTurk.

My own (limited) MTurk experience has been quite positive and in particular I like using MTurk for pilot testing of Qualtrics experiments. I have found that my pilot tests on MTurk are reliable guides to what I see in the BRITE lab in most cases.

However, this summer there was a "mini-crises" among academics who use MTurk heavily because many were starting to see a rise in low-quality responses. There was initially a big fear that people were creating automated bots to take MTurk studies. However, it now appears that the issue is actually that there are a number of foreign "workers" who are using survey farms and proxy servers to take multiple studies and often to pass themselves off as being in the U.S. so that they can qualify for studies that set higher screens.

There was some really interesting research on this that I'd like to highlight here . There was also a good twitter thread this week on a technique for getting these respondents using server farms out of any study you might run.

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 18 | September 21, 2018