Current IFREE-Supported Doctoral Candidates
Anticipated Graduation after 2012
Chen, Cecilia [Jingnan]
Pan, Sophia [Xiaofel]
Anticipated Graduation 2011
Aimone, Jason A.
Chen, Tianwen
Hao, Li
Former IFREE-Supported Doctoral Candidates (2006-2010)
2010
Bejarano, Hernan
Jaworski, Taylor
Kimbrough, Erik
McBride, Will
2009
Christie, Angelina N.
Lin, Shengle
2006-2008
Aycinena, Diego
Baltaduonis, Rimvydas
Chui, Mun
Deck, Cary
DeScioli, Peter
Hampton, Kyle
Parente, Michael
Rigdon, Mary
Tila, Dorina
Winn, Abel
Xiao, Erte
Zillante, Artie
Current IFREE-Supported Doctoral Candidates
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Anticipated graduation after 2012
Chen, Cecilia [Jingnan]
Cecilia (Jingnan) Chen earned her Bachelors Degree at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). It was there that she was first introduced to experimental economics and developed the passion that led to her decision to pursue doctoral studies in this area (SJTU pioneered experimental economics in China through the Vernon Smith Experimental Economics Laboratory). The generous support of IFREE has enabled her to further her academic pursuits in experimental economics.
Cecilia’s current research focuses on testing an asset pricing theory advanced by Geanakoplos and Fostel (2008). This theory suggests that when assets can be used as collateral to borrow, there can emerge a deviation from the law of one price as well as a flight to collateral. The reason is that asset prices can reflect not only future cash flows but also the asset’s efficiency as a liquidity provider. An important implication is that during anxious times, when confidence and liquidity weaken, the spread between asset prices with different collateral capacities widens, so that investors flee to assets with stronger collateral capacity as compared to a flight to quality safer assets. Early data have been collected and are encouraging. The ultimate hope for this line of research is that it sheds new light on financial crises.
Cecilia is currently a third year student and scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science at George Mason University.
Pan, Sophia [Xiaofel]
Sophia (Xiaofei) Pan is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at George Mason University. In 2012 Sophia will be completing her dissertation and going on the job market in Economics.
Sophia (Xiaofei)’s research focuses on the growth of institutions that promote efficient voluntary pro-social behaviours among non-kin groups. Through the use of a novel experiment design and after drawing connections with evolutionary psychology, her current study provides the first robust empirical evidence with respect to how competitive cues based on small rewards, like trophies, mediate male generosity in competitive social environments. In particular, this investigation lies at nexus of behavioral economics, evolutionary biology and anthropology, drawing from and extending the theory of costly signaling. It has immediate implications for literatures aimed at underlying factors responsible for observed gender differences in competitive inclinations that might partially explain contemporary gender wage gaps. It proposes new approaches for the charitable giving literature, where trophy-seeking and ‘status’ ranking can be easily adopted within fundraising appeals. Sophia received dissertation improvement grants from National Science Foundation for this research. One paper titled “Competition for Trophies Triggers Male Generosity” will be forthcoming in PloSOne, another relevant paper also received revision requested by CESifo Economic Studies. Besides, Sophia also investigates how group membership manifest itself on trust, forgiveness and betrayal. Sophia looks forward to further advancing this agenda as she begins her career as a research scholar.
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Anticipated graduation 2011
Aimone, Jason A.
After Jason completed his bachelor’s degree in economics at Emory University, he earned a masters degree at Texas A&M University focusing on experimental and labor economics. His advisors at A&M and at Emory suggested to him that the best group and place to study experimental methods was with Vernon Smith’s ICES group at George Mason University. Knowing that he wanted to pursue an academic career in experimental economics, he followed this advice and discovered since the truth in the advice.
While ICES, IFREE, and GMU support have allowed Jason to pursue a wide range academic projects (ranging from understanding labor decisions of prison inmates, to investigating endogenous group formation, to auction design), the bulk of Jason’s work has focused on understanding how information and emotions can impact economic decision making.
Specifically Jason’s dissertation work examines how preferences surrounding the risk and knowledge of betrayal can affect social exchange in environments involving trust. The extent of the results and the feedback he has received from the first paper on betrayal has blossomed into a line of projects on the topic, which Jason thinks will take him well through the remainder of his Phd program, as well as form the backbone of his initial research agenda as he begins a career as a research professor.
Chen, Tianwen
Research Assistant at ICES at GMU.
Tianwen Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Computational Science and Informatics, George Mason University, expecting to graduate in 2010. He also serves as a Research Assistant at ICES/GMU.
His current research is geared to improving statistical analysis in neuroeconomics. His dissertation focuses on how to integrate functional correlations in preprocessing fMRI dataset, informing the multiple comparisons correction and building multivariate Bayesian models. The main approach is to identify functional dependency via clustering in temporal-spatial fMRI time series.
His current work also includes a fMRI study to examine the caffeine-based placebo effects on human economic decision making. The goal is to inderstand the neural basis of cognitive placebo effects and whether there is a general neural mechanism for placebo effects — in combination with placebo effects in other fMRI studies of pain, Parkinson’s and Alzheimers diseases.
Tianwen has expressed gratitude for IFREE in providing funding for him to advance the statistical analysis involving neuroimaging, which he believes will have a tremendous impact on neuroeconomics.
Hao, Li
The study of economics never clicked for Li Hao until she learned firsthand about experimental economics when she met Professors Vernon Smith, David Porter and Bart Wilson at a workshop they taught in Shanghai in December 2004. Li was captivated by their insightful and innovative approach to studying markets and human behavior. Her thinking at the time was, ”Wow, economics really makes sense, and answers so many questions before not answered, and it is fun!” She did not hesitate when the opportunity arose to apply for an IFREE scholarship to study in the PhD program at ICES/George Mason University. Li is in her fourth year of IFREE-sponsored doctoral study at ICES/GMU.
Li’s research focuses on economic mechanism design, such as auction design, as well as econometric methods for experimentalists. She is eager to use laboratory tools to compare different market institutions for important policy implications, and for bridging economic theories and applications. She looks forward to further advancing this agenda as a serious scholar in the field.
Former IFREE-Supported Doctoral Candidates (2006-2010)
Bejarano, Hernan
Research Assistant at ESI on the IFREE-funded Wholesale Electricity System Design Project
Doctoral candidate, Pennsylvania State University (expected graduation in December 2010)
After living through the privatization of the Argentinean electric system in the 1990’s and posterior imposition of new rules in 2001, Hernan Berjarano witnessed how institutional changes affected economic outcomes. His current work in collaboration with Professor Stephen Rassenti at ESI on system design of wholesale electricity, funded largely by IFREE, is focused on understanding how different institutional designs of the electricity sector including spot, future and/or capacity markets affect the behavior of the participants, distributors and generators of electricity. They have been specifically interested in addressing the question of how the differences between institutional designs have motivated different investment patterns in new generating capacity. One of the most important findings of the project has been to gain a better understanding of the importance of the demand response. (Demand response is the set of actions that distributors or utilities can use to decrease the consumption of their consumer by re-negotiation with their own customers.) The use of demand response in the experimental environment proved to be an important source of stabilization in the system by transferring in a more efficient way the signals of scarcity or abundance of generating capacity represented in wholesale market price to the consumers and therefore, adapting consumers’ behavior to more realistic economic incentives.
Currently Hernan is a doctoral candidate at Pennsylvania State University (PSU). His dissertation research is under the advise of Professors James Shortle (PSU) and Daniel Houser (GMU) and is focused on market design for “Water Quality Permits Trade”. In the short run, Hernan’s goal is to understand which are the best types of institutions that can be implemented to reduce pollution through voluntary participation of some of the polluting generating sources.
Hernan believes that experimental economics methodology is the optimal choice in identifying the relative importance between institutional causes, behavioral causes and their interrelationship. A better understanding of these relationships will help us explain the causes generating the observed failure of some of the proposed markets as a tool for pollution control. In the long run, Hernan would like to extend the research to different kinds of institutions of voluntary participation, with especial emphasis on markets as allocation mechanisms. To achieve these goals, the study of subjects’ behavior should be conducted in a broader sense implying not only actions but also inaction or decisions of non-participation of the experimental subjects are analyzed and studied. New types of experimental designs are needed in order to identify how the differences voluntary institutions generate different outcomes. These new designs should provide the experimental subjects with outside options that reflect their status quo values. We also need to understand how different behavioral characteristics of the subjects might affect their willingness to participate in different types of institutions.
In order to achieve these goals, his work with research scholars at ESI will be important. Hernan is a recent alumni of the IFREE-sponsored Graduate workshop held at ESI in January. He reports that it was a very fine experience overall and enjoyed meeting and working with other pre-docs from around the country and the world.
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These candidates successfully defended their dissertations in economics at George Mason University in 2010.
Jaworski, Taylor
Visiting Research Associate at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute.
Taylor A. Jaworski currently works at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute as Visiting Research Associate, focused most intensely on developing a curriculum to use laboratory experiments and the ideas of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers to teach high school economics. In particular, he is working with Professor Bart Wilson and ESI programmer Jeffrey Kirchner to design hand-run versions of three computerized research experiments for classroom use. These experiments, together with reading and discussion materials drawn from Adam Smith, David Hume, and others, are meant to introduce high school students to economics as a discovery process under-girded by property rights and rules of exchange. This approach to teaching the principles of economics is intended to demonstrate the sensitivity of the wealth creation process to institutions as well as the tremendous power of specialization and exchange. This project funded by the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics.
In addition, Taylor is in the process of completing a paper (co-authored with Bart Wilson) on the role of migration in formation of property rights. This paper grew out of his first course in experimental economics and what later became my undergraduate thesis. It was while working on this project that he became interested in economic history and spent the academic year 2007-2008 pursuing a Master’s Degree in that subject at the London School of Economics, where his independent research focused on the wealth accumulation and manufacturing productivity in the United States during the Civil War.
Taylor will be leaving ESI in August 2009 to enter a graduate program in economics. His future research interests are in experimental economics and economic history, in particular in using laboratory experiments to inform debates in US economic history related to government land use and development in the 19th century and changes in corporate governance in the early 20th century.
Kimbrough, Erik
Visiting Research Associate at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute.
Erik Kimbrough is a PhD candidate in Computational Sciences and Informatics at George Mason University and a Visiting Research Fellow at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute. In 2010 Erik will be completing his dissertation and going on the job market in Economics.
Erik’s research applies experiments and agent-based models to the endogenous formation of economic institutions such as property rights and money. Eventually he hopes to apply the same methods to the creation of cities and policies, but for now he realizes that it is important to understand the foundations of exchange before moving to questions of such complexity. If you want to understand how a society builds itself, you have to start with the basics.
Erik states, “IFREE has been instrumental in helping focus my ideas and in providing the support I need to pursue them. I’ve been very fortunate to work directly with Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson on a number of projects, and the funding provided by IFREE has helped me run many exciting experiments.”
McBride, Will
Research Assistant at ICES at GMU on the IFREE-funded FDA Dual Track program.
Will McBride is currently working as a Research Assistant at ICES at GMU on the IFREE-funded FDA Dual Track program. This program looks at health care decisions when there are alternatives to the FDA process of approving drugs. Dual Track refers to one such alternative, where subjects are given the option to choose unapproved drugs which have little or no information regarding efficacy. Over time, efficacy information accumulates and is made readily accessible, making Dual Track a viable option.
As a doctoral student in economics at GMU, Will expects to complete his dissertation next spring. His dissertation focuses on the financial crisis, and he plans to use the experimental economics lab to test the theory and historical practice of free banking, i.e. no particular government involvement in banking.
Will is especially interested in the effects of free banking on the business cycle, which he intends to measure as effects on an experimental asset market.
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These candidates successfully defended their dissertations in economics at George Mason University in 2009.
Christie, Angelina N.
Angelina Christie was born and reared in Ukraine, where she witnessed both the inefficiencies of central planning and the chaos of a poorly implemented transition. Driven by her experiences, she left the Ukraine at age 18 to study economics in the United States, her interest in economics driven by the question of why some systems work better than others. She studied market institutions from several mainstream and alternative perspectives, but she found either their theories or their toolkits lacking.
As a doctoral student of Vernon Smith at George Mason University, Angelina was introduced to experimental economics. It was by this path that she knows that “I truly began to understand the workings of the market: in particular, the distinction that experimental economics draws between the environment, the institution, and the behavior of the agents. As a childhood admirer of Albert Einstein and a fan of detective fiction, I found myself drawn to the application of replicable experimentation and scientific method to the study of economic problems.”
Angelina’s IFREE-assisted doctoral research at George Mason University involved studying the behavior of firms and investors in the initial public offering market under competing institutions of bookbuilding and auction. She was specifically interested in why companies in the United States prefer the traditional bookbuilding approach, even though this generally leads to the initial underpricing of shares.
Angelina is continuing this research program as Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics at James Madison University, after successfully having defended her dissertation at ICES/GMU in February 2009. She is using the results of her experiments as building blocks to future investigations into privatization mechanisms.
With an IPO a privately held firm goes public; privatization is similar: a state-run enterprise is then sold into private hands. The post-Soviet transition was deeply flawed; the system was easily gamed. How can this be improved in future privatization mechanisms? How do we value a state-run enterprise before it is sold? What efficiency metric do we use for privatization? How will individuals behave in a given environment under different institutions? These are some of the questions that are driving her research investigations.
Another area of her research concentrates on the moral hazard problem in financial regulation – ways in which policy-makers fail to understand incentives and to take into account the ways in which changes to financial rules and regulations change the behavior of financial firms. For example, how do banks alter their investment behavior in the presence of government insurance, guarantees, and bailouts – cases in which the downside of a risky investment is mitigated? Experimental economics has much to offer policy-makers, especially in the current economic environment.
Of no less importance to Angelina than her research is her undergraduate teaching, which she regards as her true calling. She hopes to inspire students to study economics and to pursue a graduate education. And because many students go through their college years with but a single semester of economics, she believes it is of paramount importance to reach these students in the time she has with them. In the three months she has with them she must teach them to reason and to think like economists do; she must help them gain an intuition of how markets work, and when they . leave her class she wants them not to remember the answers she gave to their questions, but rather to be able to give their own answers based on their understanding.
It is in this classroom environment that experimental economics again becomes a most valuable tool. Classroom experiments allow the teacher to go from theory to practice and evidence. They reinforce the material taught and spark an interest in economics as a discipline. Supply and demand graphs on a whiteboard can seem singularly uninteresting to a sleep-deprived undergraduate, but a simple experiment can awake their interest and turn on the light of understanding. Students engage in discussions of what just happened and why. The graphs begin to make sense.
Experimental economics provides a way both to address problems of interest to a researcher and to reach the students who take economics classes. Angelina knows she will remain inspired by her two intellectual heroes in the field: F.A. Hayek, who challenged disciplinary boundaries and reached into disparate fields to achieve a greater understanding of economic behavior; and Vernon Smith, who brought a new set of analytical tools to economics and who has taught her to be fearless and dispassionate in the experimental pursuit of economic understanding.
Lin, Shengle
Visiting Research Associate at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute.
Shengle Lin received a BA in Economics and Mathematics from Dalian Unviersity of Technology in DaLian, LiaoNing, China, and an MA from George Mason University, where he has studied with Danial Houser, David Porter, and Vernon Smith. Shengle is now a doctoral candidate at George Mason University, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University.
His research seeks to use the laboratory to evaluate trading institutions in financial markets and to test the fundamental principles of asset pricing. The primary investigation regards market microstructure. He’s been showing, under a double auction exchange, how an investor’s private value would quickly yield to the value of others and the “average opinion of the average opinion” prevails. He’s also been showing that the intermittent call market poses multiple desirable features for offering a reliable platform. His dissertation proposal explores the mechanism of information infusion with relation to the market’s under-reaction to news.
Shengle’s secondary investigation regards examining the fundamental principles of asset pricing theorems. Those include why the core principles of the consumption based asset pricing theorem would easily fall apart in the presence of a small number of speculators, why historic price is relevant to current price formation, why option-implied volatility “smiles” at us, etc.
After his graduation this year, Shengle hopes to continue the exploration for better institutional designs for organized exchange and the search for more robust asset pricing models.
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These individuals completed their Ph.D’s between 2006-2008.
Aycinena, Diego
Diego Aycinena is Catedrático at the Facultad de Ciencias Económicas and Director of the Centro Vernon Smith de Economía Experimental of Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. He focuses on using laboratory experiments to test alternative market mechanisms and field experiments to evaluate impact of new financial products on migrants and their families.
Diego received his Ph.D. from George Mason University and his dissertation used experimental economics to test alternative mechanisms to procure energy and reserves for electric power markets. His dissertation advisor was Vernon Smith and his dissertation was possible due to the generous financial support provided by IFREE.
Prior to his current academic position, he was a Research Scholar at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, and a consultant for the World Bank. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University and a BA from Universidad Francisco Marroquín.
Baltaduonis, Rimvydas
IFREE Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute.
Rimvydas’s research and teaching interests are in market design, industrial organization, economics of social institutions, and transition economies. His current research is focused on energy, particularly electricity, markets. Lately, Rimvydas examined the performance of three auction mechanisms for wholesale power markets – Offer Cost Minimization auction, Payment Cost Minimization auction and Simple-Offer auction – when electricity suppliers act strategically. He also analyzed wholesale gas market in California, retail milk market in New England, banking sector in Eastern and Central Europe, wood and furniture industry in Lithuania. He is also working on IFREE’s Outreach to Eastern and Central Europe, the first step consisting of a workshop promoting experimental economics in Lithuania for Spring 2009 co-sponsored by IFREE and the ISM University of Management and Economics.
Chui, Mun
Mun is an Assistant Professor at Shanghai JiaoTong University. He holds a PhD from the Department of Computational and Data Sciences at George Mason University where he was an affiliated student in the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science. His research focuses in auction design. Specifically, he is interested in the effect that bidding information has on bidder behavior in both single and multiple object environments.
Deck, Cary
Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Arkansas.
Cary Deck, was an IFREE pre-doctoral fellow from 1999 through 2001, and in 2008-09 is a visiting research associate at the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University, on sabbatical leave as an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Arkansas.
If you walk into a department store you will see the same posted prices that every other customer sees. Technological advances may enable sellers to set prices just for you in the near future. Retailers are beginning to attach RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags to individual items. This technology is used to monitor theft and minimize stock outs, but it could also be used to update prices to targeted customers. For example, having placed bread and peanut butter in your shopping cart may suggest you are likely to want jelly and sellers could use this information to update its price as you approach. Similar pricing strategies could be implemented in online markets as well.
Cary had been using controlled laboratory experiments to identify the likely impact on market outcomes associated with this type of sequential pricing. The results indicate that while sellers often compete as a loss leader to attract shoppers, the net result is that sellers are able to capture more surplus with sequential pricing than with bundling (selling combinations of goods jointly).
Another stream of Cary’s research focuses on coordination. One current project looks at the effect of mutual monitoring when people are trying to coordinate in a “weakest link” game in which the group performance is determined by its worst member. This structure applies to many strategic situations such as production along an assembly line, preparing a plane for an on time departure, or an offensive line providing protection to a quarterback. The experimental results suggest that a little information can be dangerous as behavior reminiscent of a run on a bank or panic selling keeps groups from working together.
A second current project looks at the R&D process and asks when firms will coordinate their research efforts by forming a joint venture and when they will work alone. The experimental results indicate that, consistent with theory, the greater the competition in the output market the less likely firms are to form a joint venture.
A new coordination project focuses on the acceptance of money. An item serves as money only if the agents in an economy agree to coordinate activity with it. This project builds upon the research Cary began when he was an IFREE-pre-doctoral fellow.
DeScioli, Peter
IFREE Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute.
Peter DeScioli completed his PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. He was an IFREE pre-doctoral fellow during his final year of graduate school. He completed work on his paper on “The Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship” during that final year, and the paper was published in June 2009 in the biology journal PLoS ONE (read the paper online here). Peter is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University.
Most broadly, his research focuses on the specialized mental processes that humans use to navigate their complex social worlds. His investigations draw on theory from evolutionary biology and game theory, and he uses methods from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and experimental economics. His experimental work has concentrated on strategic aspects of morality and friendship. Recently, Peter has been collaborating with Bart Wilson to better understand the psychology of ownership and the transition between personal and impersonal exchange.
To get a taste of Peter’s work, here are a few of his experimental results. First, in economic games people spend much more money to punish moral violators (cheaters) when their punishment decisions will be announced to an audience. This suggests that moral condemnation performs some type of signaling function. Second, when people judge a given action as morally wrong, they nearly always perceive a victim of the violation. That is, even “victimless” offenses (e.g., consensual incest, grave desecration, or suicide) are not represented by the mind as victimless. This study also found that people often identify the self as simultaneously being the perpetrator and victim of an offense (e.g., suicide, drug use). Third, people judge moral violations by omission as less wrong and less deserving of punishment than when the same violation occurs by commission. This is not only true for violent offenses (letting die / killing) but occurs across different types of violations such as theft, drug use, and prostitution. Fourth, consider a person who could have saved a victim’s life but chose to do nothing, versus someone who pressed a button that they knew would do nothing. The first was judged to deserve 2 years in prison; the second received 19 years. The associated set of experiments showed that causality and intention are insufficient explanations for the omission effect, and that offense transparency is a crucial variable. Last, how close people feel to different friends is largely explained by their perceptions of where they stand among their partner’s other friends. That is, people like most those friends who rank fewer others above them.
Hampton, Kyle
Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Kyle Hampton is relocating to Anchorage Alaska where he will serve as the Director for the Center of Alaska Economic Education and as Associate Professor in Economics at UAA. He is departing Columbus, Ohio where he taught in a variety of subject areas at The Ohio State University, which followed a two-year stint at the University of Hawaii – Manoa, where, along with teaching, he was involved in a variety of research projects. These have included an experimental design analysis of the post-9/11 anti-trust exemption granted to Aloha and Hawaiian Airlines and a cross-cultural study of behavior and group composition in team projects. His current research focus is on modeling innovation and experimentation in the laboratory by observing subjects solving puzzles under a variety of incentive conditions.
Present economic circumstances have provided Kyle with a variety of challenges and opportunities to integrate the lessons of experimental economics into his classes and research. The public is clearly discontented by traditional economics’ mechanistic worldview and now desire explanations that delve deeper into the psychological and institutional causes for the current crisis. Experimental economics in general, and IFREE specifically, are well-positioned to effect change in the minds of the public and policymakers, both in the research and education/outreach domains.
Parente, Michael
Michael Parente is a research fellow at the Market Based Management Institute in Wichita, KS. With IFREE’s support, he has designed experiments to test proposed rule changes to the FCC’s auctions for spectra licenses and had the opportunity work closely with faculty knowledgeable in this area.
His current research expresses an interest in how auction design might be used to prevent the “Tragedy of the Anti-Commons,” in which multiple rights holders effectively have a veto over the productive use of a resource, often resulting in waste through under-use (much as the commons results in overuse). Anti-commons problems can exist when a land developer must negotiate with multiple smaller property owners, or when the R&D of a new technology (such as an innovative software program or a pharmaceutical drug) requires the consent of multiple patent holders. By replicating anti-commons problems in the lab, Michael hopes to further our understanding of how to prevent the waste that these problems generate.
Rigdon, Mary
Assistant Research Scientist, University of Michigan.
Mary Rigdon is an experimental economist at the Research Center for Group Dynamics of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Economics and Mechanism Design from The University of Arizona in 2001 with Dr. Vernon Smith as her advisor.
Mary uses laboratory experiments to examine what conditions and institutions foster cooperation. Her main research focuses on how these issues arise in personal exchange and bilateral bargaining, and how the phenomenon of trust and reciprocity in these environments facilitates cooperation. She is also interested in designing mechanisms that can facilitate cooperation in these relationships. Her work has been supported by IFREE.
Tila, Dorina
Dorina received a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from University of La Verne California, Athens branch. In May 2005, she received a Masters degree in Economics from George Mason University while continuing her PhD. Her research interests include experimental economics and prediction markets, and she is currently writing her dissertation in information aggregation and its potential obstacles in information markets.
Winn, Abel
tba
Xiao, Erte
Erte Xiao is an Assistant Professor, Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research involves investigating the role of social norms, punishment and emotions in economic exchange environments. By understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying the effect of social norms and incentives, Erte hopes to help policy makers design institutions to improve market efficiency.
Advantaged by the generous support of IFREE, she had the unique opportunity to apply experimental methods to further her interest in developing incentive mechanisms to enforce cooperation and norm obedience, to understand why people might follow social norms even in absent incentives, and to obtain a better understanding of how people make decisions when confronted with social norms that suggest conflicting decisions.
For example, in a recent experimental project, Erte and co-author, Cristina Bicchieri, found that people do what they believe others would do in the same situation, regardless of what they believe others think they ought to do. This is important because, of course, what people believe others actually do can be very different from what people believe others should do! Moreover, empirically establishing this dominance relationship leads to important policy implications regarding how to design institutions to enforce norm obedience, especially in those cases where misconduct (e.g., corruption) is widespread.
Xiao is grateful to IFREE for support during her doctoral program, where she collected the data for the following paper:
(2011) Houser, Dan and Erte Xiao, “Punish in Public.” Journal of Public Economics (Forthcoming).
Zillante, Artie
Artie Zilante, a former IFREE Visiting Post-Doc Scholar at ICES/GMU for two years, is now an assistant professor in the Economics Department at UNC Charlotte. He is a co-creator, with Dmitry Shapiro, of E-LaBR, the Experimental Laboratory for Business Research at UNC Charlotte.
Artie’s research focuses on using economic experiments to understand how changes in institutional arrangements and mechanism designs affect economic and social outcomes. His research to date has used the experimental method to examine these effects in auctions, lemons markets, and voting, and he is also interested in industrial organization research, particularly in intertemporal competitive practices.
Current funded projects include studying sequential auctions with symmetric and asymmetric values, evaluating the revenue and efficiency properties of name-your-own-price mechanisms and keyword word search auctions, and examining alternatives to eminent domain to provide a market-oriented solution to the holdout problem.
Artie currently teaches a PhD course in microeconomics, an undergraduate course specifically devoted to game theory, and a Master’s course which is about 2/3 game theory and 1/3 experimental design. Experiments are used in all the courses he teaches as a method of introducing a new topic, and a goal is to develop an undergraduate course in experimental design at UNC Charlotte.