Development and History
Development and Economic History
Members of the Development and Economic History Research Group combine archival data, lab-in-the-field experiments, randomized controlled trials, text analysis, survey and secondary data along with theoretical tools to study issues in development and economic history. Faculty and students work in the field in South Asia, China and Africa as well as doing archival work in libraries across Europe and Asia.
Almost all faculty are members of CAGE in the economics department and some are also members of Warwick Interdisciplinary Centre for International Development (WICID). There is a regular weekly external seminar, two weekly internal workshops, and high quality research students. We also organise international conferences on campus, or in Venice.
Our activities
Development and Economic History Research Group Workshop/Seminar
Monday: 1.00-2.00pm
For faculty and PhD students at Warwick and other top-level academic institutions across the world. For a detailed scheduled of speakers please follow the link below.
Organisers: Bishnupriya Gupta and Claudia Rei
People
Academics
Academics associated with the Development and Economic History Research Group are:
Research Students
Events
CAGE-AMES Workshop - Adam Di Lizia (PGR)
Title: The Anatomy of Online Reviews: Evidence of Self-Selection from the Steam Store.
Abstract How good are reviews as signals of product quality for consumers? Using a data-set derived from the popular `Steam' gaming platform I investigate the self-selection of reviewers. A policy reform on Steam in 2019 both lowered the transaction cost of reviewing, with this randomly occurring within a game and reviewer's life cycle. I find that the new individuals elicited to review by the policy change are 4\% more likely to rate any game positively, leave 15\% shorter reviews and are less experienced both within and across games. This selection is heterogeneous across games, greatly affecting their rank order and while some sellers benefitted from the increase in selection, others did not. Overall, the policy reduced selection bias and improved the consumer's information set, but new reviewers were rated as less helpful by their peers, implying that more accurate review scores come at the cost of less helpful reviews.