Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/03/2024
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Lanny Zrill, Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University, will present to our economics graduate students and faculty on Wednesday, March 6 in KTH 334!

Lanny is an Experimental Economist, who assists projects requiring experimental design and programming, data analysis. He is a Behavioural Economics, who’s work utilizes tools from decision theory, revealed preference, and experimental economics in order to compare methodologies/theories, measure preferences, and identify individual decision making attitudes and processes. He has a particular interest in the potential and limitations of computationally intensive experimental designs for creating richer data sets and improving the power of experiments. He will present the paper, “Nudge Me: Preferences over Default-Setting Rules,” previously circulated under, “Default-Setting and Default Bias: Does the Choice Architect Matter?“.

Abstract

This paper studies how choices are influenced by the procedure used to select the default option. We develop an approach to test and compare default bias across different default-setting rules while controlling for heterogeneous preferences. We apply it to a within-subjects experimental design lottery choice experiment to compare four different default-setting rules: Random defaults, Custom defaults selected based on an individual’s own past choices, Social defaults selected based on others’ choices, and Expert-set defaults. We find that the  content of default-setting rules matters: default bias is present for all non-random default-setting rules we study, but not for randomly set defaults. 

View Lanny’s professional website.