andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-157 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Dan Kahan writes: Here is a very interesting article form Science that reports result of experiment that looked at whether people bought a product (picture of themselves screaming or vomiting on roller coaster) or paid more for it when told “1/2 to charity.” Answer was “buy more” but “pay lots less” than when alternative was fixed price w/ or w/o charity; and “buy more” & “pay more” if consumer could name own price & 1/2 went to charity than if none went to charity. Pretty interesting. But . . . What’s odd, I [Kahan] think, is the measure used to report the result. The paper (written by some really amazingly good social psychologists; I know this from other studies) goes on & on, w/ figures & tables, about how the amusement park’s “revenue,” “revenue per ride” & “profit” went up by large amount when it used “name your own price & 1/2 to charity.” Yet that result is dominated by random effects — the marginal cost & volume of sales are peculiar to the product being sold &
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Dan Kahan writes: Here is a very interesting article form Science that reports result of experiment that looked at whether people bought a product (picture of themselves screaming or vomiting on roller coaster) or paid more for it when told “1/2 to charity. [sent-1, score-0.466]
2 ” Answer was “buy more” but “pay lots less” than when alternative was fixed price w/ or w/o charity; and “buy more” & “pay more” if consumer could name own price & 1/2 went to charity than if none went to charity. [sent-2, score-1.676]
3 What’s odd, I [Kahan] think, is the measure used to report the result. [sent-7, score-0.051]
4 The paper (written by some really amazingly good social psychologists; I know this from other studies) goes on & on, w/ figures & tables, about how the amusement park’s “revenue,” “revenue per ride” & “profit” went up by large amount when it used “name your own price & 1/2 to charity. [sent-8, score-0.558]
5 ” Yet that result is dominated by random effects — the marginal cost & volume of sales are peculiar to the product being sold & have nothing to do w/ the experimental treatment. [sent-9, score-0.403]
6 A social scientist won’t–b/c again, the measures are dominated by random effects; one has to *remove* these to figure out how the 4 different options actually effected behavior! [sent-11, score-0.361]
7 , or a comic book– it’s not clear that “pay what you want w/ 1/2 to charity” was even profit-maximizing for the roller coaster operator, since it might well have made still more money if it lowered the “fixed price” w/o charity, an option that isn’t included in the experimental conditions. [sent-14, score-0.479]
8 In fact, if one reads carefully, one get a good bit of the information that is actually relevant, at least to social scientists, who presumably are ones reading Science: “The results of the two fixed $12. [sent-15, score-0.187]
9 95 price conditions reveal low and similar purchase rates (0. [sent-16, score-0.412]
10 In the PWYW treatments, buyers paid significantly more per photo when half of the revenues went to charity (M = $5. [sent-22, score-1.255]
11 Or in other words, if you *bundle* good w/ contribution to charity, people are willing to pay more for it than if you don’t bundle. [sent-29, score-0.136]
12 I doubt, though, that this would have been as catchy a way to present the paper, which in fact has gotten a lot of coverage. [sent-31, score-0.056]
13 But I’m not surprised that they are teaching people marketing at a business school! [sent-33, score-0.052]
14 It’s been awhile since anyone’s sent me an email with the word “barf. [sent-34, score-0.053]
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same-blog 1 1.0000002 157 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-21-Roller coasters, charity, profit, hmmm
Introduction: Dan Kahan writes: Here is a very interesting article form Science that reports result of experiment that looked at whether people bought a product (picture of themselves screaming or vomiting on roller coaster) or paid more for it when told “1/2 to charity.” Answer was “buy more” but “pay lots less” than when alternative was fixed price w/ or w/o charity; and “buy more” & “pay more” if consumer could name own price & 1/2 went to charity than if none went to charity. Pretty interesting. But . . . What’s odd, I [Kahan] think, is the measure used to report the result. The paper (written by some really amazingly good social psychologists; I know this from other studies) goes on & on, w/ figures & tables, about how the amusement park’s “revenue,” “revenue per ride” & “profit” went up by large amount when it used “name your own price & 1/2 to charity.” Yet that result is dominated by random effects — the marginal cost & volume of sales are peculiar to the product being sold &
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Introduction: Kieran Healy points to Robin Mahfood, the CEO of the charity Food for the Poor. This really is pretty impressive: you see a lot of good first-name or last-name matches but not so many where the entire name forms a coherent and relevant phrase.
3 0.22968559 1105 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-08-Econ debate about prices at a fancy restaurant
Introduction: Felix Salmon writes : Economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have a problem with Grant Achatz’s pricing strategy at Next, where tickets are sold at a fixed price and are then free to be resold at an enormous markup on the secondary market . . . “It’s democratic in theory, but not in practice,” said Wolfers . . . If a person can sell a ticket for $3,000, the true cost of going to the restaurant — what an economist would call the opportunity cost — is $3000, because that’s how much money the person is giving up for the meal. Bloomberg’s Mark Whitehouse concludes that Next should “consider selling tickets to the highest bidder and giving the extra money to charity” . . . What strikes me is how weird this discussion is. Why should this restaurant owner have some sort of moral obligation to maximize his income and then donate to charity? For one thing, if he really did make more money off the deal he might just keep it. But more to the point, this sort of maximiz
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Introduction: Dan Corstange writes : Who sells their votes? Clientelism and vote buying are pervasive electoral practices in developing-world democracies and autocracies alike. I [Corstange] argue that buyers, regardless of regime type, prefer cheap voters, but that parties operating in uncompetitive environments are better able to price discriminate than those operating in competitive elections. I use an augmented list experiment to examine vote selling at the microlevel in Lebanon, in which both types of environment existed in its 2009 elections. I find that just over half of the electorate sold their votes, which is more than double the proportion willing to admit it. The evidence further shows that voters with low reservation prices are most likely to sell, and that monopsonistic buyers are better able to price discriminate among sellers than are dueling machines. My comments: This is a fascinating paper. I particularly like the speculations in the conclusion–it’s always interesting t
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Introduction: This came in the inbox today: Dear Dr. Gelman, GenWay recently found your article titled “Multiple imputation for model checking: completed-data plots with missing and latent data.” (Biometrics. 2005 Mar;61(1):74-85.) and thought you might be interested in learning about our superior quality signaling proteins. GenWay prides itself on being a leader in customer service aiming to exceed your expectations with the quality and price of our products. With more than 60,000 reagents backed by our outstanding guarantee you are sure to find the products you have been searching for. Please feel free to visit the following resource pages: * Apoptosis Pathway (product list) * Adipocytokine (product list) * Cell Cycle Pathway (product list) * Jak STAT (product list) * GnRH (product list) * MAPK (product list) * mTOR (product list) * T Cell Receptor (product list) * TGF-beta (product list) * Wnt (product list) * View All Pathways
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Introduction: Dan Kahan writes: Here is a very interesting article form Science that reports result of experiment that looked at whether people bought a product (picture of themselves screaming or vomiting on roller coaster) or paid more for it when told “1/2 to charity.” Answer was “buy more” but “pay lots less” than when alternative was fixed price w/ or w/o charity; and “buy more” & “pay more” if consumer could name own price & 1/2 went to charity than if none went to charity. Pretty interesting. But . . . What’s odd, I [Kahan] think, is the measure used to report the result. The paper (written by some really amazingly good social psychologists; I know this from other studies) goes on & on, w/ figures & tables, about how the amusement park’s “revenue,” “revenue per ride” & “profit” went up by large amount when it used “name your own price & 1/2 to charity.” Yet that result is dominated by random effects — the marginal cost & volume of sales are peculiar to the product being sold &
Introduction: Sandeep Baliga writes : [In a recent study , Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner write:] For interstate highways in metropolitan areas we [Duranton and Turner] find that VKT (vehicle kilometers traveled) increases one for one with interstate highways, confirming the fundamental law of highway congestion.’ Provision of public transit also simply leads to the people taking public transport being replaced by drivers on the road. Therefore: These findings suggest that both road capacity expansions and extensions to public transit are not appropriate policies with which to combat traffic congestion. This leaves congestion pricing as the main candidate tool to curb traffic congestion. To which I reply: Sure, if your goal is to curb traffic congestion . But what sort of goal is that? Thinking like a microeconomist, my policy goal is to increase people’s utility. Sure, traffic congestion is annoying, but there must be some advantages to driving on that crowded road or pe
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Introduction: Dan Kahan writes: Here is a very interesting article form Science that reports result of experiment that looked at whether people bought a product (picture of themselves screaming or vomiting on roller coaster) or paid more for it when told “1/2 to charity.” Answer was “buy more” but “pay lots less” than when alternative was fixed price w/ or w/o charity; and “buy more” & “pay more” if consumer could name own price & 1/2 went to charity than if none went to charity. Pretty interesting. But . . . What’s odd, I [Kahan] think, is the measure used to report the result. The paper (written by some really amazingly good social psychologists; I know this from other studies) goes on & on, w/ figures & tables, about how the amusement park’s “revenue,” “revenue per ride” & “profit” went up by large amount when it used “name your own price & 1/2 to charity.” Yet that result is dominated by random effects — the marginal cost & volume of sales are peculiar to the product being sold &
Introduction: Rajiv Sethi writes the above in a discussion of a misunderstanding of the economics of Keynes. The discussion is interesting. According to Sethi, Keynes wrote that, in a depression, nominal wages might be sticky but in any case a decline in wages would not do the trick to increase hiring. But many modern economics writers have missed this. For example, Gary Becker writes, “Keynes and many earlier economists emphasized that unemployment rises during recessions because nominal wage rates tend to be inflexible in the downward direction. . . . A fall in price stimulates demand and reduces supply until they are brought back to rough equality.” Whether Becker is empirically correct is another story, but in any case he is misinterpreting Keynes. But the actual reason I’m posting here is in reaction to Sethi’s remark quoted in the title above, in which he endorses a 1975 paper by James Tobin on wages and employment but remarks that Tobin’s paper did not include the individual-level de
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