Solution! Re: Export To Excel Mark as New Bookmark Subscribe Mute Subscribe to RSS Feed Permalink Print Email to a Friend Report Inappropriate Content slipstream42 Regular 2017-07-31 04:22 PM another csv export link it is quite nicehttps://rawgit.com/watsonbox/exportify/master/exportify.htmlcode on github View solution in original post 31 Likes
works great
This complication is typically addressed in one of two ways: “controlling for blocks” in a regression context, or inverse probability weights (IPW), in which units are weighted by the inverse of the probability that the unit is in the condition that it is in.
I don't think these are equivalent. I believe only the latter recovers the ATE under heterogeneity... but this is just my memory.
The gains from a blocked design can often be realized through covariate adjustment alone.
I believe Athey and Heckman come out strongly in favor of blocking instead of covariate adjustment.
Of course, such heterogeneity could be explored if complete random assignment had been used, but blocking on a covariate defends a researcher (somewhat) against claims of data dredging.
A preregistration plan can accomplish this without any cost.
In this simulation complete random assignment led to a -0.59% decrease in sampling variability. This decrease was obtained with a small design tweak that costs the researcher essentially nothing.
This is not visible in the html. You specified too few digits.
Also, the results would be more striking if you had a smaller data set.
with(hec, mean(Y1 - Y0))
ATE with heterogeneity?
# Reveal observed potential outcomes
He means 'the outcome observed given random assignment'
when deploying a survey experiment on a platform like Qualtrics, simple random assignment is the only possibility due to the inflexibility of the built-in random assignment tools.
That's not entirely true
Since you need to know N beforehand in order to use simple_ra(), it may seem like a useless function.
this is a confusing sentence
depending on the random assignment, a different number of subjects might be assigned to each group.
In large samples this won't usually matter much... but still worth avoiding, to make power as high as possible.
Y0 <- rnorm(n = N,mean = (2*as.numeric(Hair) + -4*as.numeric(Eye) + -6*as.numeric(Sex)), sd = 5)
linear heterogeneity of baseline and of TE
hec <- within(hec,{
why does he use 'within' rather than mutate?
As you can see, having one fewer child still comes out looking like a solid way to reduce carbon emissions — but it’s absolutely nowhere near as effective as it first seemed. It no longer dwarfs the other options. On this model, instead of having one fewer kid, you can skip a couple of transatlantic flights and you’ll save the same amount of carbon. That seems like a way more manageable sacrifice if you’re a young person who longs to be a parent.
Even if I believed the highly optimistic predictions of very strong climate policy in the USA (which I don't), having one fewer child still reduces emissions each year more than twice as much as living car free or avoiding a trans-atlantic flight every year.
And they state it as "instead of having one fewer kid, you can skip a couple of transatlantic flights and you’ll save the same amount of carbon." ... but this requires each parent to forgo 2 transatlantic flights they would have taken every year for the rest of their life, if I understand correctly.
commas <- function(...) stringr::str_c(..., collapse = ", ")
no braces needed for function on a single line
it’s the same as the input!
because we want to modify columns in place
Compute the mean of every column in mtcars.
output <- vector("double", ncol(mtcars)) # 1. output
for (i in seq_along(mtcars)) { # 2. sequence
output[[i]] <- mean(mtcars[[i]]) # 3. body
}
The rational expectation and thelearning-from-price literatures argue that equilibrium prices are accurate becausethey reveal and aggregate the information of all market participants. The MarketSelection Hypothesis,MSH, proposes instead that prices become accurate becausethey eventually reflect only the beliefs of the most accurate agent. The Wisdomof the Crowd argument,WOC, however suggests that market prices are accuratebecause individual, idiosyncratic errors are averaged out by the price formationmechanism
Three models (arguments for) drivers of market efficiency
external fundraising page
What is meant by 'external'?
Fundraising Dashboard / Participant Center Visited When a person visits their fundraising dashboard or participant center
who is the 'person' visiting the dashboard here?
Fundraising Page Created / Registration Complete Upon completion of the last step of the registration flow that creates a fundraising page
by whom? which ones can be detected?
Contributing to the textbook Use Hypothes.is, an amazing tool for annotating the web. Go to Hypothes.is, and “get-started”
To nudge people slightly towards this, you can add to the index.Rmd:
includes:
in_header: [header_include.html]
And in that header_include.html file, inclide
<script async defer src="https://hypothes.is/embed.js"></script>
I do this here in my Writing Economics book
head(as.data.frame(nasa))#> lat long month year cloudhigh cloudlow cloudmid ozone pressure #> 1 36.20000 -113.8 1 1995 26.0 7.5 34.5 304 835 #> 2 33.70435 -113.8 1 1995 20.0 11.5 32.5 304 940 #> 3 31.20870 -113.8 1 1995 16.0 16.5 26.0 298 960 #> 4 28.71304 -113.8 1 1995 13.0 20.5 14.5 276 990 #> 5 26.21739 -113.8 1 1995 7.5 26.0 10.5 274 1000 #> 6 23.72174 -113.8 1 1995 8.0 30.0 9.5 264 1000 #> surftemp temperature #> 1 272.7 272.1 #> 2 279.5 282.2 #> 3 284.7 285.2 #> 4 289.3 290.7 #> 5 292.2 292.7 #> 6 294.1 293.6
unrolling a tbl_cube into 2 dimensions (data.frame)
Now this can be simplified using the new {{}} syntax: summarise_groups <- function(dataframe, grouping_var, column_name){ dataframe %>% group_by({{grouping_var}}) %>% summarise({{column_name}} := mean({{column_name}}, na.rm = TRUE)) } Much easier and cleaner! You still have to use the := operator instead of = for the column name however. Also, from my understanding, if you want to modify the column names, for instance in this case return "mean_height" instead of height you have to keep using the enquo()–!! syntax.
curly curly syntax
(1) “How likely do you think it is that this hypothesis will be replicated (on a scale from 0% to 100%)?” (2) “How large do you think the standardized effect size (in terms of Cohen’s d) from the replication will be, relative to that in the original paper (on a scale from −50% to 200%)?”, and (3) “How well do you know this topic? (Not at all; Slightly; Moderately; Very well; Extremely well.)”
pre-market survey Many labs 2
0.506 (0.532)
can we find any measures of dispersion here?
For the 12 studies with an original p < 0.005, 10 (83%) replicated. For the 12 studies with an original p > 0.005, only 1 (8%) replicated. Further work is needed to test if prediction markets outperform predictions based only on the initial p-value, to test if the market also aggregates other information important for reproducibility.
p values may capture all the information?
At least one of my un-named research co-authors will heartily agree with this statement.↩︎
Hi Dave!
ps f
this doesn't run on my system. However
ps -f
seems to list processes started in the terminal
and
ps -ef
lists all (?) processes
List previous command history: history
useful
It’s worth noting that first line of the script starts with #!. It is a special directive which Unix treats differently.
Term hash tag at top of bash scripts are NOT comments... they are important
Happy Git and GitHub for the useR
Oska: can you see this note?
8 Writing, argumentation, presentation, and (Economic) logic: Being clear and making sense
a relevant Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/TheDapperChef/status/1215048065477832704
List of words and phrases to avoid -- what are your biggest pet peeves in student writing?
and https://www.dropbox.com/s/lmbgoziyjz9o0q3/Zaks%20Guide%20to%20Writing.pdf?dl=0
Prediction in Policy
Relevance to my own project: can we predict who has the most to gain from admission to an HE institution. (But I'm limited in what I can report)
Suppose the algorithm chooses a tree that splits on education but not on age. Conditional on this tree, the estimated coefficients are consistent. But that does not imply that treatment effects do not also vary by age, as education may well covary with age; on other draws of the data, in fact, the same procedure could have chosen a tree that split on age instead
a caveat
hese heterogenous treatment effects can be used to assign treatments; Misra and Dubé (2016) illustrate this on the problem of price targeting, applying Bayesian regularized methods to a large-scale experiment where prices were randomly assigned
todo -- look into the implication for treatment assignment with heterogeneity
Chernozhukov, Chetverikov, Demirer, Duflo, Hansen, and Newey (2016) take care of high-dimensional controls in treatment effect estimation by solving two simultaneous prediction problems, one in the outcome and one in the treatment equation.
this seems similar to my idea of regularizing on only a subset of the variables
In particular, a set of papers has already introduced regu-larization into the first stage in a high-dimensional setting, including the LASSO (Belloni, Chen, Chernozhukov, and Hansen 2012) and ridge regression (Carrasco 2012; Hansen and Kozbur 2014
worth referencing
These same techniques applied here result in split-sample instrumental variables (Angrist and Krueger 1995) and “jackknife” instrumental variables
some classical solutions to IV bias are akin to ML solutions
Understood this way, the finite-sample biases in instrumental variables are a consequence of overfitting.
traditional 'finite sample bias of IV' is really overfitting
Even when we are interested in a parameter β ˆ, the tool we use to recover that parameter may contain (often implicitly) a prediction component. Take the case of linear instrumental variables understood as a two-stage procedure: first regress x = γ′z + δ on the instrument z, then regress y = β′x + ε on the fitted values x ˆ. The first stage is typically handled as an estimation step. But this is effectively a prediction task: only the predictions x ˆ enter the second stage; the coefficients in the first stage are merely a means to these fitted values.
first stage of IV -- handled as an estimation problem, but really it's a prediction problem!
Prediction in the Service of Estimation
This is especially relevant to economists across the board, even the ML skeptics
New Data
The first application: constructing variables and meaning from high-dimensional data, especially outcome variables
Zhao and Yu (2006) who establish asymptotic model-selection consistency for the LASSO. Besides assuming that the true model is “sparse”—only a few variables are relevant—they also require the “irrepresentable condition” between observables: loosely put, none of the irrelevant covariates can be even moderately related to the set of relevant ones.
Basically unrealistic for microeconomic applications imho
First, it encourages the choice of less complex, but wrong models. Even if the best model uses interactions of number of bathrooms with number of rooms, regularization may lead to a choice of a simpler (but worse) model that uses only number of fireplaces. Second, it can bring with it a cousin of omitted variable bias, where we are typically concerned with correlations between observed variables and unobserved ones. Here, when regular-ization excludes some variables, even a correlation between observed variables and other observed (but excluded) ones can create bias in the estimated coefficients.
Is this equally a problem for procedures that do not assum sparsity, such as the Ridge model?
97the variables are correlated with each other (say the number of rooms of a house and its square-footage), then such variables are substitutes in predicting house prices. Similar predictions can be produced using very different variables. Which variables are actually chosen depends on the specific finite sample.
Lasso-chosen variables are unstable because of what we usually call 'multicollinearity.'<br> This presents a problem for making inferences from estimated coefficients.
Through its regularizer, LASSO produces a sparse prediction function, so that many coefficients are zero and are “not used”—in this example, we find that more than half the variables are unused in each run
This is true but they fail to mention that LASSO also shrinks the coefficients on variables that it keeps towards zero (relative to OLS). I think this is commonly misunderstood (from people I've spoken with).
One obvious problem that arises in making such inferences is the lack of stan-dard errors on the coefficients. Even when machine-learning predictors produce familiar output like linear functions, forming these standard errors can be more complicated than seems at first glance as they would have to account for the model selection itself. In fact, Leeb and Pötscher (2006, 2008) develop conditions under which it is impossible to obtain (uniformly) consistent estimates of the distribution of model parameters after data-driven selection.
This is a very serious limitation for Economics academic work.
First, econometrics can guide design choices, such as the number of folds or the function class.
How would Econometrics guide us in this?
These choices about how to represent the features will interact with the regularizer and function class: A linear model can reproduce the log base area per room from log base area and log room number easily, while a regression tree would require many splits to do so.
The choice of 'how to represent the features' is consequential ... it's not just 'throw it all in' (kitchen sink approach)
Ta b l e 2Some Machine Learning Algorithms
This is a very helpful table!
Picking the prediction func-tion then involves two steps: The first step is, conditional on a level of complexity, to pick the best in-sample loss-minimizing function.8 The second step is to estimate the optimal level of complexity using empirical tuning (as we saw in cross-validating the depth of the tree).
ML explained while standing on one leg.
egularization combines with the observability of predic-tion quality to allow us to fit flexible functional forms and still find generalizable structure.
But we can't really make statistical inferences about the structure, can we?
This procedure works because prediction quality is observable: both predic-tions y ˆ and outcomes y are observed. Contrast this with parameter estimation, where typically we must rely on assumptions about the data-generating process to ensure consistency.
I'm not clear what the implication they are making here is. Does it in some sense 'not work' with respect to parameter estimation?
In empirical tuning, we create an out-of-sample experiment inside the original sample.
remember that tuning is done within the training sample
Performance of Different Algorithms in Predicting House Values
Any reason they didn't try a Ridge or an Elastic net model here? My instinct is that these will beat LASSO for most Economic applications.
We consider 10,000 randomly selected owner-occupied units from the 2011 metropolitan sample of the American Housing Survey. In addition to the values of each unit, we also include 150 variables that contain information about the unit and its location, such as the number of rooms, the base area, and the census region within the United States. To compare different prediction tech-niques, we evaluate how well each approach predicts (log) unit value on a separate hold-out set of 41,808 units from the same sample. All details on the sample and our empirical exercise can be found in an online appendix available with this paper athttp://e-jep.org
Seems a useful example for trying/testing/benchmarking. But the link didn't work for me. Can anyone find it? Is it interactive? (This is why I think papers should be html and not pdfs...)
Making sense of complex data such as images and text often involves a prediction pre-processing step.
In using 'new kinds of data' in Economics we often need to do a 'classification step' first
The fundamental insight behind these breakthroughs is as much statis-tical as computational. Machine intelligence became possible once researchers stopped approaching intelligence tasks procedurally and began tackling them empirically.
I hadn't thought about how this unites the 'statistics to learn stuff' part of ML and the 'build a tool to do a task' part. Well-phrased.
Why not also use it to learn something about the “underlying model”: specifically, why not use it to make infer-ences about the underlying data-generating process?
(they give reasons why not)
Economic theory and content expertise play a crucial role in guiding where the algorithm looks for structure first. This is the sense in which “simply throw it all in” is an unreasonable way to understand or run these machine learning algo-rithms.
At least we (Economists) hope this is the case ... motivated reasoning?
available finite-sample guidance on its implementation—such as heuristics for the number of folds (usually five to ten) or the “one standard-error rule” for tuning the LASSO (Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman 2009)—has a more ad-hoc flavor.
It sounds like there are big unknowns... a lot is still 'rules of thumb'
Should out-of-sample performance be estimated using some known correction for overfitting (such as an adjusted R2 when it is available) or using cross-validation?
Do people use \(R^2_{adj}\) for this? Would that fit under 'machine learning'?
Kernel regressionKernel bandwidth
hadn't realised kernel can be done in the ML framework
final category is in direct policy applications. Deciding which teacher to hire implicitly involves a prediction task (what added value will a given teacher have?), one that is intimately tied to the causal question of the value of an additional teacher.
Academic Economists: this is usually the 'we also can do this' part of a paper rather than it's core, no?
In another category of applications, the key object of interest is actually a parameter β, but the inference procedures (often implicitly) contain a prediction task. For example, the first stage of a linear instrumental variables regres-sion is effectively prediction. The same is true when estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, testing for effects on multiple outcomes in experiments, and flexibly controlling for observed confounders.
This is most relevant tool for me. Before I learned about ML I often thought about using 'stepwise selection' for such tasks... to find the best set of 'control variables' etc. But without regularisation this seemed problematic.
Machine Learning: An Applied Econometric Approach
Shall we use Hypothesis to have a discussion ?
David Chalmers: I think I may have introduced this actually years ago. I call it “The law of minimization of mystery”. I was making fun of some people who wanted to tie consciousness and quantum mechanics. But I do think there are interesting potential links between the two. I mean. The problem in quantum mechanics is not just that it’s mysterious.It’s a very specific problem. How do the standard dynamics of quantum mechanics which has these two processes: Schrodinger evolution and wave function collapse. Mostly the wave function evolves this way, except on certain times, when you make a measurement, the wave function changes in this special way, and that’s totally standard quantum mechanics.
Some great points here.
He is saying something like "consciousness collapses the quantum wave function"
Bundling quantum mechanics and consciousness together… “The law of minimisation of mysteries” (a sarcastic point).
“maybe these two weird things are just one weird thing”
But it seems natural because there is this mysterious. Process, collapse of a wave function, that happens on measurement and what is measurement but conscious observation?
I’ve argued you need something new in the story and the kind of view I’ve been drawn towards are views that take consciousness as something sort of fundamental and irreducible in our picture of the natural world in the same way that we take space and time and mass and charge as fundamental. We’re used to the idea that some things are fundamental. If you can’t explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of your old laws, your old properties and laws, spacetime, mass, Newtonian dynamics, you bring in something else. Electric charge, Maxwell’s laws.Likewise, I think for consciousness. So I’ve been drawn towards views that take consciousness as fundamental and what that comes to in practice in philosophy is either you’ve got the choice between either a dualist view where you’ve got. You’ve got the physical world, which is one thing, and then you’ve got say the mind, you’ve got consciousness, which is another thing.They’re both fundamental properties distinct from each other. And then there are laws that connect them. That’s one view. And the other view is panpsychism, which says consciousness is somehow present at the very basis of the physical world and maybe the physics that we know and love basically somehow fundamentally involves consciousness somehow.
Should we consider consciousness as a fundamental of the universe like space-time mass and magnetism? I.e., Irreducible.
This leads to dualism and panpsychism. The latter apparently asserts that there is some element of consciousness that is part of the equation and physical processes and maybe its present everywhere.
think the most interesting of which is that this whole idea of consciousness is an illusion. A pathology built up by our cognitive systems to believe we have these special properties of consciousness introspectively, even though we don’t.
"Illusionism" (1.21:15) There is an argument that our brain and the physical processes trick us into thinking we have the special properties of consciousness.
I don’t understand this argument, if we don’t have consciousness then who is in there that can be tricked?
David Chalmers: Yeah, but I also think there are these sociological effects where most people think… we got this on the PhilPapers survey that most people think that most people think a certain thing, even though most people think the opposite.
Inconsistency between first and second orderly beliefs among philosophers... in the survey there are many cases where people think everyone thinks A when actually most people think B.
I’m sure that many of them are among listeners potentially. It seems like there’s a bit of a stream of this among rationalists and I often find natural scientists, I just can’t get them to accept that there’s like anything strange about consciousness existing.
people who deny that there is anything puzzling or special about consciousness. ... These people are just being JERKS.
David Chalmers: Well, the big obvious thing that can be said in defense of philosophy here is the thing that I said already. Which is philosophy by its nature is the field where there’s disagreement, because once we obtain methods for producing an agreement on questions and reasonably decisive ways, we spin it off and it’s no longer philosophy.So from that perspective, philosophy has been this incredibly effective incubator of disciplines. Physics span out of philosophy. Psychology span out of philosophy. Arguably to some extent, economics and linguistics span out of philosophy. So what usually happens is not that we entirely solve a whole of a philosophical problem, but we come up with some methods of say, making progress experimentally or formally on a certain subquestion or aspects of that question and then that gets spun off. The part that we haven’t figured out how to think about well enough that remains philosophy.
I hadn't appreciated this point before
the highest correlation coefficient in this survey was 0.56 which is kind of only moderate and it was between moral realism and cognitivism which obviously have a lot to do with one another directly
what were the other typical correlations?
Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I guess in politics it seems that that brings out people’s tribal instincts, so they tend to group together for practical reasons, if not intellectual reasons, like kind of all sharing the same views or like wanting to fall into line and are particularly incentivized to do that. An interesting thing, I’ll provide a link to a study looking at how ideologically tightly grouped are people in politics, which found that uneducated people just like have views all over the place. Their views on one question don’t really predict their views on another.
The Ezra Klein take on Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe’s "Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. "?
So are you saying that you think political people group together more in politics than philosophers do in philosophy? Hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison here, of course, as most people don't think deeply about these philosophical questions.
David Chalmers: I don’t know. Where I come from, 0.56 is a pretty high correlation coefficient. So I don’t know. Maybe it depends on the area.
seems high to me also
And I think at that point, wherein something like in a verbal dispute, which can happen in these cases where you have different people mean different things by free will and well, I think that diagnosis is more apt for some of these questions than for others, but like this is the case again where your average philosopher uses free will, well the thing tied to moral responsibility. Many people outside philosophy may still think, ah, why use free will for that? I want to use free will for this other thing. This ability to fundamentally go against the laws of nature. And then we just have a difference about which one is worth caring about.
They get into the discussion of free will and they answer the question they think is easy -- moral responsibility is compatible with a lack of free-will (they say, they never presented the complete argument).
This feels like somewhat of a cop-out, akin to a political spokesperson answering the question they wanted to answer and not the one you asked. (And then claiming they answered your question).
Free will ... People aren't primarily interested in it for the 'moral responsibility' question.
I want to know if I have free will to know if I'm in control, to know if anything I do matters or if I'm just an automaton/robot.
Now someone interested in free will could say, well, that wasn’t what I cared about (moral responsibility).
I'm that guy. I'm saying exactly this.
What is it like to be you right now? You’re seeing this text on the screen, you smell the coffee next to you, feel the warmth of the cup, and hear your housemates arguing about whether Home Alone was better than Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. There’s a lot going on in your head — your conscious experiences
First of all, this is a great podcast and a great episode. Lots of great exchanges. This actually 'adds value' (cringey term, sorry) in terms of your understanding of those topics that come up in deeper-than-deep late-night wistful hours conversations. If you are interested in what it means to live you should listen to this episode. Don't waste your life not listening to this episode.
Also see slides 1-7 of the powerpoint HERE
Sorry, I forgot the link: HERE it is
Update: Free online access to this text may be available through your university/library (this works at Exeter) via www.vlebooks.com
I think you need to sign in via Shibboleth
1.2 Readings and resources
Note that for 2019 The NS is the main one referred to!
. (2018: but this won’t be focal on the exam.)
2019-20: this may come up. Please read into it to get the basic ideas.
Anyone else on hypothesis that can see this? Would be nice to use this to start a conversation.
Losing face PDF
Open research working paper version: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/427678/1/LosingFace_workingversion_no
Losing face
Open research working paper version: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/427678/1/LosingFace_workingversion_nomarpar.pdf
David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
Anyone here? I'll add my notes, wonder what others think.
Prior exams with answers and ‘mock exams’
See tips on how to answer and mark breakdowns in the student forum, responding here: https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/mod/forum/post.php?edit=383503
Bee2024 finishing insurance problem from sixth problem set
May be helpful in revising
Shorter 'rooftop' video going through 3 cases of 'two-person Public goods' via powerpoint
may prove useful in revising
Power rule
I will give you the formula for the power rule on an exam, but it wouldn't hurt to practice it!
Asymmetric information (Moral hazard, adverse selection, signaling) Separate notes/handouts, to be integrated in Readings tbd Behavioural economics – first lecture (limits to cognition, willpower, self-interest), second lecture (applications) [11] NS: Ch 17, plus supplements T1:11 Further readings tbd Eighth problem set: Behavioural economics Overall each reading is optional, but to do well on the exam you need to do at least some of these readings, and/or cover some of the more advanced material. Supplementary reading: theory Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, 1979. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk” (Seminal) Supplementary reading: applications and empirical work DellaVigna, Stefano. “Psychology and economics: Evidence from the field.” Journal of Economic literature 47.2 (2009): 315-372. Benartzi, S. & Thaler, R.H., 2007. Heuristics and biases in retirement savings behavior. The journal of economic perspectives, pp.81-104. Farber, H., 2008. Reference-dependent preferences and labor supply: The case of New York City taxi drivers. The American Economic Review. Available at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/aea/aer/2008/00000098/00000003/art00021 [Accessed November 19, 2015]. (Behavioural insights team) EAST: Four simple ways to apply behavioural insight Kellner, Reinstein and Riener, 2016. Conditional generosity and uncertain income: Field and lab evidence Material linked at giveifyouwin.org
2019-20: This has not been covered
The payoff from staying Silent (cooperating) in each period is: −2×(1+g+g2+g3+...)−2×(1+g+g2+g3+...)-2 \times (1 + g + g^2 + g^3 + ... ) Here I get -2 in each period, starting today. Discounting this, we add up -2 (today), −2g−2g-2g (next period), −2g2−2g2-2g^2 (the period after next), etc, as represented above. The payoff from Confessing right away (after which both players Confess always) is: −1−3×(g+g2+g3+...)−1−3×(g+g2+g3+...) -1 -3 \times (g + g^2 + g^3 + ... ) Formula for a geometric series (where 0<g<10<g<10<g<1): g+g2+g3+g4...=g/(1−g)g+g2+g3+g4...=g/(1−g)g + g^2 + g^3 + g^4 ... = g/(1-g) Note on Maths: The standard derivation of this, which is pretty neat, is in the text. This formula is an important one in economics (and beyond), particularly for discounting a constant stream of payoffs, e.g., stock dividends Thus cooperation in a single period is ‘weakly preferred’ (at least as good) if (−2)×(1+g+g2+g3+...)≥(−1)+−3×(g+g2+g3+...)(−2)×(1+g+g2+g3+...)≥(−1)+−3×(g+g2+g3+...)(-2) \times (1 + g + g^2 + g^3 + ... ) \geq (-1) + -3 \times (g + g^2 + g^3 + ...) g+g2+g3+...≥1g+g2+g3+...≥1g + g^2 + g^3 + ... \geq 1 Note on the intuition for the second formula: the left side is loss of future payoffs (-3 vs -2 forever from next period, so a loss of 1 per period starting tomorrow). The right side is gain in ‘the present’ period (getting -1 rather than -2), so it is un-discounted. g/(1−g)≥1g/(1−g)≥1g/(1-g) \geq 1 g≥12
2019-20: you will not be asked to do this computation on the final exam, but you should understand the general idea
Individual optimisation solved problem
relevant for the final examination
Nash proved that if we allow mixed strategies, then every game with a finite number of players in which each player can choose from finitely many pure strategies has at least one Nash equilibrium.
It always has at least one Nash equilibrium (but it may only be a NE in mixed strategies).
More volatile underlying assets will translate to higher options premiums, because with volatility there is a greater probability that the options will end up in-the-money at expiration.
That's interesting
The option is European and can only be exercised at expiration.No dividends are paid out during the life of the option.Markets are efficient (i.e., market movements cannot be predicted).There are no transaction costs in buying the option.The risk-free rate and volatility of the underlying are known and constant.The returns on the underlying are normally distributed.
Some of the assumptions underlying the Black-Scholes model. Do these limit its realism and predictive power?
In low-income countries the vast majority are unwilling to pay for effective drugs simply because they are unable to pay. Low-income nations need more price discrimination—and vastly lower prices—if they are ever to afford the world's most effective medicines.
Does price discrimination help poor countries here? Which countries have more price-inelastic demand? Does PD increase social welfare for this case?
She found a German seller offering packs of the same nappies she buys in Luxembourg for the same price she normally pays. Looking more closely at the unit price, however, Nadine realised that the German packs contained 140 nappies, whereas the packs in Luxembourg had only 90, making them much more expensive. She switched straight away to buying all her nappies from the German shop.
If this was price discrimination... which country's consumers likely had the higher price elasticity?
Channel Tunnel
Is this tunnel a public good? Is it excludable? Is it rival?
I think that the preservation of these documents could be seen as providing pure public good. We value that these have been preserved for posterity even if we don't visit the Magna Carta ourselves. What do you think?
map_dbl(df, mean)
it just performs this operation on all 'list elements'... here, vectors in the dataframe
out[i] <- fun(df[[i]])
this step is critical: we can apply the function referenced in the function argument
Holt, C., and S. Laury (2002), Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects, American Economic Review, v. 92 (5): 1644-1655. Crosetto, Paolo, and Antonio Filippin. “A theoretical and experimental appraisal of four risk elicitation methods.” Experimental Economics 19, no. 3 (2016): 613-641. Pedroni, Andreas, Renato Frey, Adrian Bruhin, Gilles Dutilh, Ralph Hertwig, and Jörg Rieskamp. “The risk elicitation puzzle.” Nature Human Behaviour 1, no. 11 (2017): 803.
These are worth looking at closely and discussing
Suggestion: look at this closely, and the associated readings
we will come back to this when we cover asymmetric information
11.11 Who benefits from 3DPD?
Suggestion: look at this closely, and the associated readings
University strikes: Students demand tuition fee refunds for planned walkouts
Interesting discussion, worth looking into.
It's an interesting point
Find the pure-strategy Nash equilibrium or equilibria
Tutorial - try to focus on how we know ther ewill be 2 pure strategies and 1 mixed strategy NE here
3. Now draw the farmers’ ‘best response functions’ in a diagram.
Worth covering in tutorial starting from here, focusing on intuition rather than algebra and calculus
Do parts A and B; part C is optional enrichment
Worth covering A-B in tutorial if time permits
This (answer) should say: MR=53-2Q=MC=5... the "-" or dash is confusing here
ero marginal cost for one more user.
We know this from the statement
Suppose also that the intended pool is large enough so that whatever number of families come on any day will not affect what people are willing to pay for the pool. (I.e., no congestion)
This second assumption, called diminishing marginal utility, will imply ‘risk aversion’!
A student asked
I want to ask why risk-averse has a decreasing marginal utility? Thank you.
Response:
If someone has a decreasing marginal utility of income and they maximise expected utility then they will be risk averse.
This is something that takes a long time to fully explain, and I try to give an explanation in the web-book and in lecture (and again in tomorrow's lecture).
One simple intuition.: Risk averse essentially means "I will never take any fair gamble".
E.g., "I'll never accept a bet with an equal chance of losing or gaining some amount X." How does diminishing MU of income explain this? If I have diminishing MU of income then my utility is increasing in income at a decreasing rate.
The first units of income (e.g., going from 0 income to 15k income) add more utility than the later units of income (e.g., going from 15k income to 30k income) , which adds more than even later increments (e.g., going from 30k to 45k), etc.
So "an equal chance of losing or gaining X" would not be attractive to such a person. Why not? Because relative to any point "losing X" reduces my utility more than "gaining X" increases it.
E.g., in the above example, if you started at 15K income you wouldn't want to have an equal chance of losing or gaining 15K in income. Having 0 income would be terrible, while having 30k income would be better, but not 'that much' better. As we said, the utility difference between 0 and 15K is much greater than the utility difference between 15k and 30k... because of the assumption of diminishing marginal utility. So it's better to have 15k for sure than to have a 50/50 chance of 0k or 30k.
The 'utility loss from losing 15k' is greater than the 'utility gain from gaining 15k'. As expected utility weights the utility of each outcome by its probability and sums these, in considering a 1/2 chance of losing 15k and a 1/2 chance of gaining 15k these probabilities weight equally, so I only need to consider "does the utility cost of losing 15k exceed the utility gain from gaining 15k" in this example. Because of diminishing MU, we know it does not. Nor does it for any "equal chance of losing or gaining some amount X". Thus this person is risk-averse.
I hope this helps. Looking at the 'utility of income' diagrams may also be helpful.
Two statistics about reducing your risk of an early death made headlines around the world recently. The first seems to be a great reason to add a four-legged friend to your life. It suggests that owning a dog is tied to lowering your chance of dying early by nearly a quarter. The second statistic claims that even a minimal amount of running is linked to reducing your risk of premature death by up to 30%. Ruth Alexander finds out what’s behind these numbers and we hear from epidemiologist, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz.
It's amazing that statistics like these... (seemingly without even minimal obvious controls for age etc.) get reported so naively in the media. Note that one of the interviewees suggests one approach that would provide evidence on the impact of pets on longevity ... random dog assignment. He seems to doubt the health benefits; I don't know, it seems plausible to me, but I'd like to see some real evidence.
I've hedged (a bit). Have you?
2018 final exam with suggested answer guidelines
I just put this up ... last year's final exam with suggested answer guidelines
For problem 6 I'll award 1.5 marks for "CD" even though it's not correct. But I admit you need to look at the wording of this question carefully
Should we help companies tailor prices to your wage packet?
Please leave comments and questions here (or in below comments section if you prefer)
writing
If you are going for 'fancy stuff' you might mention markdown, rmarkdown/knitr etc. This will replace latex imho
LaTeX is a high-quality system equipped with special features for technical and scientific documentation. A great tool for thesis help due to its user-friendly interface and dozens of helpful features. For example, the tool automatically generates bibliographies and indexes.
If you are going to mention latex you should mention Overleaf
NS: Ch 16 – public goods section only (skip Lindahl equiliibrium; sections on median voter and single-peaked preferences are optional)
Note that I give the reading from the Nicholson and Snyder text at the top of each section.
Ans: B and D
Several students asked...
This problem seems to be on page 66 of the NS text. On the bottom left, it says, "This person would pay up to distance CD in other goods for the right to buy a second ticket at the original price."
I understand the confusion. They would pay up to C-D for the right to buy this at the given price, in addition to the price, reflected by that budget constraint. So the maximum total amount they would pay for the second ticket is the vertical distance B-D.
No, because if it were at such a point, it could raise its price and its revenue would increase and costs would decline.
Analogy: If I'm on a mountain and I see it is still sloping upwards, I am certainly not at the highest point.
If I am at a "point A" where I can improve my outcome (here, by raising revenue and reducing costs, then "point A" must NOT have been optimal. 'Never locate at point where you can clearly do better!'
Paying the vertical distance between B and D (sacrificing this amount of ‘other goods’) to obtain the second ticket will leave her at point D. This is on the same indifference curve aas point B so this leaves her equally well off. Thus this is the most she would be willing to pay for the second ticket.
Wang Chao:"can you expkain more?why not c to d? and why a is unachievable?"
DR: after buying the first ticket she is at point C. After this, paying vertical distance B-D (in other goods) puts her at point D, which makes her as well off as point B-- thus she is indifferent. She cannot choose point A because of the rationing policy.
No, because if it were at such a point, it could raise its price and its revenue would increase and costs would decline.
Just confirming - (d) IS the correct answer. If the firm can improve upon a choice then that choice must not have been an optimal choice. -DR
Mock mid-term exam
Students: Please comment on the questions (choose 1-2) you would like us to cover in tutorial, and if you like, let us know what questions or doubts you have.
Individual optimisation solved problem
This is a challenging problem. Knowing how to solve it and understanding what this means may help you both on the midterm assessment and the final examination
Individual optimisation solved problem
Student asked: Could something like this be on the final exam?
Answer: Yes
Student asked: Would you be able to 'avoid it by choosing a different question with less maths?'
Answer: Possibly/probably, but it's better to learn how to do it ... in case you don't like the other question either.
‘people buy less when the price rises, all else equal’.
I should say, 'when it rises because of a shift in the supply curve or because a monopoly seller chooses to raise prices'
Really the principle is that in aggregate people are willing to buy fewer units at this higher price.
MRT(K,L)MRT(K,L)MRT(K,L) equal
This should say RTS as in 'marginal rate of technical substitution' ... fixing it now
MRT(K,L)MRT(K,L)MRT(K,L)
This should say RTS as in marginal rate of technical substitution
Sugden, Robert. “Looking for a Psychology for the Inner Rational Agent.” Social Theory and Practice 41, no. 4 (2015): 579-98.. ‘Predicting Hunger: The Effects of Appetite and Delay on Choice’; Read and van Leeuwen, 1998 … and related work… worth getting a sense of this, particularly in the context of the Sugden (2015) reading, such as Kahneman and Richard H. Thaler. 2006. “Anomalies: Utility Maximization and Experienced Utility.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20 (1): 221-234
2019: It's also worth getting a sense of these readings for the midterm. Try to at least get the 'gist' (basic idea) and recall some specific arguments and examples.
Waldfogel, Joel. “The deadweight loss of Christmas.” The American Economic Review 83.5 (1993): 1328-1336. Reinstein, David. “The Economics of the Gift.” (2014; working paper and chapter in Gift Giving and the’embedded’Economy in the Ancient World, F Carlà, M Gori - 2014). D. Colander \Edgeworth’s Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility’’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007: 215-225. Sugden, Robert. “Looking for a Psychology for the Inner Rational Agent.” Social Theory and Practice 41, no. 4 (2015): 579-98..
These are only indirectly relevant to the midterm; worth skimming/reading if you have time, and may come up later in the module
Friedman, Milton. “The methodology of positive economics.” (1953): 259. Classic but perhaps outdated Sugden, Robert. “Credible worlds: the status of theoretical models in economics.” Journal of Economic Methodology 7.1 (2000): 1-31. Sugden, Robert; Sitzia, Stefania. “Implementing theoretical models in the laboratory, and what this can and cannot achieve.” Journal of Economic Methodology, Vol. 18, 2011, p. 323-343.
2019: These are relevant for the midterm
AUT: Lecture 3 - Axioms of Consumer Preference and the Theory of Choice (note, slightly different notation)
The readings from Autor's course (note these are class notes not an 'academic article') are core and not supplementary... 2019: Relevant to the midterm.
Waldfogel, Joel. “The deadweight loss of Christmas.” The American Economic Review 83.5 (1993): 1328-1336. Reinstein, David. “The Economics of the Gift.” (2014). D. Colander \Edgeworth’s Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility’’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007: 215-225.
These are indirectly relevant for the 2019 midterm
Loomes, Graham, Chris Starmer, and Robert Sugden, 1991.“Observing Violations of Transitivity by Experimental Methods”. jstor link Choi, Syngjoo, et al. “Who is (more) rational?.” The American Economic Review 104.6 (2014): 1518-1550.a.
2019: These are relevant for the midterm ... but you don't need to know all the technical details
For maths, see also Mathematical methods for economic theory … also free online!
the "Khan academy" https://www.khanacademy.org is highly recommended
Here Y has a diminishing MU, but for X MU is constant
Student asked:
I am confused because I thought that diminishing MRS meant that it declined as consumption increased? So if Y increases, surely MRS increases as well since MRS=Y?
Ahh, I see a typo here ... it increases as Y increases, which is what we call diminishing MRS. Unfortunately, the term 'diminishing MRS' is confusing the way economists use it, at least in these texts ... it means that as we move 'down' an indifference curve (less Y more X) we are willing to give up less Y to gain a unit of X. So as we move the other way we increase Y (and decrease X) and the MRS rises... when I have more Y I'm willing to give up more of it.
(Left) when goods are perfect substitutes, there is no Substitution effect of a price change. For prices lll and l′l′l', the minimum-cost consumption that attains U1U1U_1 is the same point (A,B)
This is backwards -- left is perfect complements (I said 'substitute/) and right is perfect substitutes (I said 'complements'. Rest is correct, wiill fix this shortly.
common measure of the burden: ‘amount a person would be willing to pay to avoid tax’, for a given revenue raised *A step-by-step illu
This illustration needs a small correction --- y2, x2 should line up with the red dot. Will fix it.
2. That is, at this consumption plan he or she would be willing to give up 3 beer
THIS is a typo -- I'll fix it!
f*h'(r)
index 'h' here rather than 'n+h' because f*(r) does not take the (n-vector) x as an argument (it sets these optimally, conditional on the r-vector and computes the output).
Goals of this problem set: Re-acquaintance with mathematical approaches to Economics (e.g., simultaneous equations, graphing functions) Revising the supply and demand model and its implications, applying this to real-world problems, considering empirical approaches Understanding the logic of ‘difficult’ multiple choice questions (assessment tips) Discussing and writing a coherent response to applied Economics questions
It goes beyond this actually; I need to update the 'goals' section
Note: The lecturing ‘slides’ are posted contemporaneously to each lecture, but there is no need to look at them – this web-book (‘handout’ is king). OK, fine… the link to the slides is HERE, but don’t look at them. (If you do you will need to press ‘o’ to see the navigation map.
Those were behind the VLE -- the github hosted slides are
HERE ... etc
3 Math tools and empirical analysis - – coverage outline
slides start HERE
4 Utility and Choice (L2)
Relevant slides start HERE
2 Economic Models (L1-2)
Relevant slides starth here: https://daaronr.github.io/micro_econ_pandoc/selfc_s_intro_lecture_modules_selfc.html#/economics-and-economic-models-see-esp.-ns1
Alfred Marshall argued that a good’s price must equal both the cost to produce and the value (to consumers) of the last unit produced and consumed.
added some material below (orange) to give insight
With ‘single crossing’ (a fancy condition you can ignore in this module) there is a unique price where Qs(p)=Qd(p)Qs(p)=Qd(p)Q^s(p)=Q^d(p), and a unique quantity where the last unit’s value to the consumer equals its cost to produce.
I will elaborate on this a bit
1∗1
this should say 2x1 -- I'll correct it
GTA’s: Ten minutes, i.e., minutes 5-15 of of tutorial, perhaps (after introducing yourself etc).
Does the timing seem right?
Goals of this problem set:
we can add specific notes here
Not ‘output’ – ‘nets provided’ nor ‘paintings purchased’ (Total or marginal) impact per dollar = output per dollar ××\times impact per output
Ben Grodeck: I like the definition of Impact. It might be worth mentioning overhead costs and impact aren’t necessarily correlated (or at least not 100%).
DR: I would hope this is well-known in this audience, but you are probably right that it's worth mentioning. 'Overhead ratio' should not be (and does not seem to be) positively correlated to either the 'marginal impact of $1 donated on output' nor to 'marginal impact of $1 donated on ultimate outcomes'
Little giving to the most effective charities ‘Innumerate empathy’: key barrier to promoting effective giving?
Ben Grodeck: Is empathy innumerate? I thought as numbers got larger, people’s empathy actually decreased. (I see you mention this research later on in the presentation)
When Pandoc converts Markdown to another output format, it uses a template under the hood. The template is a plain-text file that contains some variables of the form $variable$. These variables will be replaced by their values generated by Pandoc. Below is a very brief template for HTML output:
where do we find the default (gitbook) template to be able to tweak it?
When used locally, this feature requires that reveal.js runs from a local web server.
not sure what this means.
Vague questions
incorporate examples
4.9 …Stating empirical results
sub-sub-section?
“Has the legacy of British institutions increased or decrease the level of GDP in former colonies?”
link actual papers of course
“how do risk-averse individuals choose among a set of uncertain gambles?
specific example?
Fields
add JEL codes and links
3.4 Theoretical vs. Applied (focus)
need more examples here!
The book is written in RMarkdown with bookdown. It is automatically rebuilt from source by travis. R4DS is a collaborative effort and many people have contributed fixes and improvements via pull request.
anyone other r4ds_slackers using bookdown?
Anyone in the Slack group interested in sharing comments directly on this page via this hypothesis tool? We can use the tag "r4ds_slackers"
e your thesis meaningfu
testing a note -- can anyone see this?
I'll try to find time to go through this; going to recommend it to my students at Exeter Uni, Economics. Anyone else on here seeing this?
just
test -- I will change this word to 'only'
This tool is designed to help you inform your marketing, improve retention of your donors and ultimately increase your income. It means you can target your donors in a really timely way, when you are most at risk of losing them and when they are most likely to donate, maximising your impact whilst still adhering to The Fundraising Regulations.
Henrik can you see these notes?
sample(1:6, 1)
are these interactive/Shiny? I can't get them to 'run'
A scatter plot represents two dimensional data
just testing a comment