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After making someone an offer, should you let them sleep on it?
s: We show that delaying acceptance decisions in the Ultimatum Game drastically increases acceptance rates of low offers. While in standard treatments without delay less than 20% of low offers are accepted, these numbers increase to around 65-75% as we delay the acceptance decisions by around 10 minutes. Our findings provide precise evidence for familiar notions such as ’sleeping on it’ and show that there may be a good reason why public administrations often communicate bad news on Friday afternoons.…
1 min read
Why is the divorce rate higher in cities?
vorce rates are higher in cities. Based on Danish register data, this paper shows that of the marriages formed in the city, those couples who remain in the city have a 23% higher divorce rate than those who move out. In this paper, we test whether this observation is due to sorting of more stable marriages into rural areas or if there exists a causal effect of living in urban areas on marriage instability. Our identification strategy supplements the timing-of-events…
1 min read
Why do offices get messy?
member that "broken windows" theory? We might not be sure if it applies to crime but it does apply to messy offices: We study the broken windows theory with a field experiment in a shared area of a workplace in academia (department common room). We explore academics' and postgraduate students' behaviour under an order condition (clean environment) and a disorder condition (messy environment). We find strong support that signs of disorderly behaviour triggers littering. In the disorder treatment 59% of…
1 min read
Are men and women’s political views really all that different?
suggest that the gender gap in party identification is dependent on question wording and asymmetric stereotypes about men's and women's partisan preferences. A survey experiment reanalyzes the gender gap by comparing the standard partisan battery to an alternative version that emphasizes feelings rather than thoughts. Bringing question wording into closer alignment with theory causes the gender gap to shrink. This happens in part because the "feel" questions find women to be less Democratic than did the "think" questions. Moreover,…
1 min read
Who watches TV ads?
e of the reasons TV advertising is often ineffective is because the people watching the show are not necessarily the people watching the ads. Pretty obvious when you think about it for a second but how many marketers have really taken that into consideration? Looks like people who watch dramas don't avoid ads much while reality show viewers are tuning out: Audience measures serve as the basis on which billions of dollars of television advertising are purchased each year. However,…
2 minutes
When there are lots of people to date, how do you choose?
contribute to researchers’ understanding of how humans choose mates, we examined how the number of mate options influenced the dating decisions made by 1,868 women and 1,870 men across 84 speed-dating events. Multilevel modeling of these decisions revealed that when faced with abundant choice, choosers paid less attention to characteristics requiring more time to elicit and evaluate (e.g., occupational status and educational attainment) and more attention to characteristics that are quickly and easily assessed (e.g., height and weight). Human…
1 min read
Would Americans really vote for a female president?
blic opinion polls show consistently that a substantial portion of the American public would vote for a qualified female presidential candidate. Because of the controversial nature of such questions, however, the responses may suffer from social desirability effects. In other words, respondents may be purposely giving false answers as not to violate societal norms. Using an unobtrusive measure called the "list experiment," we find that public opinion polls are indeed exaggerating support for a female president. Roughly 26 percent of…
1 min read
Who has more free time: married women or single women?
rried couples enjoy meaningful economies in time, often choosing to specialize where one spouse focuses on market work and the other on household production and childcare. Using data from the American Time Use Survey 2003–2008, I estimate significant marriage effects upon time use. Most married women gain 33–34 min of leisure each weekday when compared to single women. While marriage does not lead to more leisure for husbands, it allows them to allocate time away from home and towards market…
1 min read
