Shyam GouriSuresh

Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization (September 2017) - We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positio...

I have seen compelling examples for news media; my prior for social media would be *at least* as strong an effect.

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

academic.oup.com/ej/article/1...

I don't think it's only about being upset. It's more about recognizing that opinions and even moral perspectives can be contagious (like Haidt suggests). And audience capture can happen too. I think we need to acknowledge our own psychological susceptibility.

In a previous version, a referee asserted that our framework was impossible to apply empirically... which motivated us to try. We used prior experimental results to show that it was not only possible but also a surprisingly good fit despite having fewer degrees of freedom than regular approaches.

Anonymous referee: "This is an interesting paper on a neat topic. The idea of game theoretically modeling moral agency as involving endogenous choice of a utility function as well as a strategy is novel and promises to provide a platform for exciting new research in a field where that's hard to do."

It's a temptation good that's worthy of "sin" taxes even higher than the revenue-maximizing rate. ;)

You mean shifts the supply curve to the right, right?

I’d be a checked-out engineer too, as Osborne said. I would almost certainly be happier in that alternate universe, but probably less fulfilled and blissfully unaware of it.

Customer anger at price increases, changes in the frequency of price adjustment and monetary policy While firms claim to be concerned with consumer reactions to price increases, these often do not cause large reductions in purchases. The model develo…

Yup! This JME paper presents a formal model- www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Customer anger may help explain price rigidity and shape inflation dynamics.

Akerlof & Shiller raise a curious question in Animal Spirits: why doesn’t the local Home Depot raise shovel prices before a snowstorm? Maybe firms care about customer perceptions...
Relatedly, Mike Munger has some interesting thoughts on the psychology of price gouging, too.

Thank you!

IIRC, teaching productivity declines more slowly and your spheres of influence may be larger than you think... on that note, could you please reshare the econometrics questions you've asked Swarthmore honors students over the years? I had bookmarked some on X, but I'm no longer on that site. Thanks!

Formally add "prepone" as a preferred alternative to anticipate, the opposite of postpone.

My reading of the first excerpt is that the optimal tax rate is not a constant (unlike the optimal cholesterol level, which presumably *is* a constant); rather it is a function of economic conditions that themselves vary. I fully agree with your criticism of the second excerpt.

@khoavuumn.bsky.social being the most prominent example, no cap.

That's an interesting model and better than the status quo. As a reader, I might care more about IF (it's a rough sorting of results by usefulness and applicability under the assumption that the default result is null). But IF is an extremely unreliable and noisy signal of research rigor.

Journals should create a category like “accepted, but not in print.”

Editors can still prioritize “significant” findings for readers while also giving authors of carefully researched null results a citable, CV-worthy publication.

This might reduce incentives to fudge data, p-hack, etc.

Anyone have a relatively easy to use (already created, cleaned, etc.) dataset on high speed rail that one of my Econometrics students could use for their final empirical project? Would be used for class only. #EconTwitter #EconSky

Barbie and the American Economy The highest grossing movie of 2023 was Barbie. Worldwide box office receipts amounted to 1.45 billion dollars, and this doesn’t include revenues from streaming rights, merchandise sales, and the sound...

On Steve Jobs, Greta Gerwig, and American higher education: open.substack.com/pub/rajivset...

Someone placed a coffee mug on the snow?

Other northie expats I knew whose Malayalam was about as mediocre as mine were not mocked similarly, perhaps because their English didn't smack of eliteness. So now I try to speak in Malayalam when in Kerala and laugh along with those who are laughing at me when I make mistakes.

This happened to me within India. Folks in Kerala would mock my Malayalam so much that I would be terrified of speaking it when visiting from Jamshedpur even though my Malayalam was kinda ok... much later, it struck me that my elite-coded English could have driven this effort to cut me down to size.

I'm considering adopting this tool, and your examples would be good to share with students to warn them of pitfalls. For me, one major benefit would be finding out what kinds of questions students are asking the platform.

I lol'd!

Also, service starts after exiting immigration and customs. Airlines/airports could perhaps offer more economical options. FWITW, I don't see this system being abused by young Indians for *themselves* in their desire for free stuff... it's mostly being used to assist their 'unaccompanied' parents.

You're right. It is expensive (I just saw a quote of $600 per person to assist with transit in Newark, for instance), but it is absolutely the appropriate service to use if there is no disability.

Thank you! 🙏☺️

There's a slight distinction in the pronunciations (evident in the Malayalam script). There's a brief "uh" (अ or അ the default inter-consonant sound in Malayalam) in the similie, and a brief "oo" (उ or ഉ) in the breakfast. The latter is often shortened to sound like a conjugate consonant in speech.

Yup. Came here to the say the same thing - root words and all.

Bluesky has really taken off for me, a person who mostly just lurks and occasionally replies. The only thing I'm missing now in my feed is South Asian/Indian Twitter...