Title: The Use of Robotic Players in Online Games

Abstract: Short in-class games have become an increasingly common way to teach a range of key concepts and theories in economics. These allow students to gain first-hand experience of incentives and the impact on decision making. This makes it easier for tutors to convey underlying economic theory and the implications of the resulting predictions. However, moving to an online environment presents a number of challenges for using this method of interactive teaching. In particular, the widespread adoption of asynchronous activities provides students with greater flexibility over the timing of their studies but also means that students cannot play interactive games against one another.

An alternative is to run games in which students play against robotic players that make decisions according to some pre-programmed rules. This greatly increase the possibility of using online games asynchronously. However, as it stands very little is known about how this affects student learning. The aim of this research was to investigate how student perceptions and behaviour change when robotic players are used. In a series of different treatments, we varied whether students knowingly or unknowingly played an online Prisoner’s Dilemma game against other students or robotic players. We then tested how this affected the students’ decisions in each round of the game and used pre and post questionnaires to measure their perceptions of the game.

First, we find that perceptions of the game were similar across all treatments. Students typically found the game to be fun to play, helped them to understand economic theories and represented real-world situations. In addition, we asked the students about their perceptions of greed both before and immediately after playing the game. We find that a significant change occurred as a result of playing the game only for students that played against a robot and knew that they were doing so. These students became less averse to greed after the game. This suggests that the in-game experience and perceptions of this may influence student learning outcomes from playing in-class games.

Then, to investigate further, we examined the in-game decision making for each of the treatments across each round of the game. We find that cooperation in a given round of the game was more likely for female students, those that had not studied economics before and students doing a pure economics degree. Furthermore, the likelihood of cooperation was unaffected if students played against a robot but didn’t know that this was the case. However, cooperation was significantly less likely when students knew that they were playing against a robot. We then show that this is in-part driven by students in this treatment being more willing to deviate in the next round having established cooperation with their robot opponent in the previous round.

Overall, our findings indicate that knowingly playing in-class games against robotic players can influence in-game decision making and this in turn can influence learning outcomes from playing the game. This suggests care needs to be taken in using robotic players in online games.

This is a hybrid seminar via MS Teams - Click here to join the meetingLink opens in a new window

Title: Overkill, extinction and the Neolithic Revolution

Via Zoom Link: https://monash.zoom.us/j/82838864348?pwd=OFN0RzVrK3RJRjFrdDhSbXd1ZDIzQT09

Title: Caution and Reference Effects (with Simone Cerreia-Vioglio and David Dillenberger)

Title:

Title: New Developments in Causal Inference with Panel Data.

This is part of 2^nd year MRes module and could be of interest to the research group as Yiqing's presentation is partly based on his new research.

The meeting is via zoom  https://turing-uk.zoom.us/j/94621198343?pwd=L3djU01uSW8xVnFsZml1VitXS0tmUT09Link opens in a new window

If you would like to meet with Yiqing, please let Mingli know.

Search Costs, Intermediation, and Trade: Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Agricultural Markets

with Lauren Bergquist and Meredith Startz.

Abstract:

Search costs may be a barrier to market integration in developing countries, harming both producers and consumers. We present evidence from the large-scale experimental rollout of a mobile phone-based marketplace intended to reduce search costs for agricultural commodities in Uganda. We find that market integration improves substantially: trade increases and excess price dispersion falls by 20% between treated markets. This reflects price convergence across relative surplus and deficit markets, with no change on average. Interpreting the experimental variation through the lens of a model with fixed costs of search, we estimate that the marketplace caused a 5% reduction in total trade costs between treated markets. Contrary to the stated goals of the marketplace, but consistent with the existence of economies of scale in search or other trade costs, almost all activity on the platform is among larger traders, with very little use by smallholder farmers. Nevertheless, the benefits of improved arbitrage by traders appears to pass through to farmers in the form of higher revenues in surplus markets, as trader entry increases and measured trader profits decrease in response to falling search costs.

Title to be advised.

Title Efficient Risk Sharing and Separation join with Arpad Abraham

Speaker: Darshak Patel (University of Kentucky)

Chair: Parama Chaudhury (UCL)

This is a hybrid event:
Venue: UCL, Room 780, Bedford Way, UCL Institute of Education (London)
To attend online on Zoom register here
The event will be live-streamed on YouTube.

Organiser: Stefania Paredes Fuentes

Title: Women and Asylums

Organisers: Bishnupriya Gupta and Claudia Rei

Title: Indirect Effects of Access to Finance, joint with Jing Cai

This seminar is joint with Bristol University and will be hosting today's event.

Title: Pedagogy and challenges for online teaching

Abstract:

The pandemic has caused an accelerated change in higher education in the UK and across the world, with online learning becoming an attractive proposition for many. But while there are a number of institutions with decades of experience in distance learning, for the majority of ‘traditional’ face-to-face universities the intake of distance learning has been rushed, to transform their offering into a blended format. However, it is not the same to teach a student who opted voluntarily to study through distance learning courses, that to teach someone who, as a member of a face-to-face institution, expects different kinds of interaction with peers and staff, access to resources, and immerse themselves in full university life. This presentation will provide some insights on my experience as both student and teacher on distance learning settings, and as digital capabilities expert, highlighting the different approaches required to keep student engagement and successful outcomes, including examples of innovative approaches to teaching and assessment.

This seminar is in-person and via MS Teams Click here to join the meetingLink opens in a new window

Title: The impact of climate transition risks on financial stability: A systemic risk approach

Zoom Link: https://monash.zoom.us/j/86161096916?pwd=eUtLZEl3dUJIakR0WGNyUVNkVVlSUT09

Title to be advised.

Title of paper: Policies for Early Childhood Skills Formation: Accounting for Parental Choices and Noncognitive Skills

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title - "Female Labor Force Participation and Intergenerational Mobility"

This paper is joint work with Jorgen Modalsli, Claudia Olivetti, and Daniele Paserman.

This seminar is online.

Andrew will be presenting Difference-in-Differences with a Continuous Treatment (with Brantly Callaway and Pedro Sant'Anna) .

If you would like to meet with him, please sign up here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19yAXbaJWko_UNrgwuktv3INE3rSueMLWviHEcgHYicM/edit?usp=drivesdk

This seminar is joint with Bristol University and Warwick will be hosting today's event.

Title: Targeting Precision Medicine: Evidence from Prenatal Screening , joint with Peter Conner, Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Heidi Williams.

Seminar organisers: Manuel Bagues & Ludovica Gazze

Panel:

Eileen Tipoe (QMUL, The CORE Project)
Pedro Rey Biel (ESADE)
James Tierney (Tierney Education)

Chair: Cloda Jenkins (Imperial College London)

This is an online event. Register here to attend live on Zoom.
The event will be live-streamed on YouTube.

Organiser: Stefania Paredes Fuentes

Francesco Capozza (Erasmus) - "Mental health literacy, beliefs and demand for mental health support among university students" (joint with Michelle Acampora, Vahid Moghani)

Zoom Link: https://monash.zoom.us/j/82044505346?pwd=SER4emJlYVk5Tmx1Mkd4elpjdDlLUT09

Simulation-based estimation with many auxiliary statistics applied to long-run dynamic analysis
by Bertille Antoine and Wenqian Sun (Simon Fraser Univ.)

Abstract:

The existing asymptotic theory for estimators obtained by simulated minimum distance does not cover situations in which the number of components of the auxiliary statistics (or number of matched moments) is large - typically larger than the sample size. We establish the consistency of the simulated minimum distance estimator in this situation and derive its asymptotic distribution. Our estimator is easy to implement and allows us to exploit all the informational content of a large number of auxiliary statistics without having to, (i) know these functions explicitly, or (ii) choose a priori which functions are the most informative. This allows us to exploit, among other things, long-run information. We illustrate the implementation of the proposed method through Monte-Carlo simulation experiments based on small- and medium-scale New Keynesian models. These examples illustrate how to exploit information from matching a large number of impulse responses including at long-run horizons.

(Time to be confirmed)

Title: Diversity and Legitimacy – Evidence from Clinical Trials

With Harsh Gupta Maya Durvasula and Heidi Williams (Stanford)