主题：Happy Times: Identification from Ordered Response Data

主讲：刘烁，北京大学光华管理学院

时间：2021年11月18日下午14点

地点：腾讯会议：208 406 942

报告摘要：

Surveys that measure subjective states like happiness or preferences often generate ordinal data. Ordered response models, which are commonly used to analyze such data, suffer from a fundamental identification problem. Their conclusions depend entirely on unjustified assumptions about the distribution of a latent variable. In this paper, we propose using survey response times to solve that problem. Response times contain information about the distribution of the latent variable, even among subjects who give the same ordinal survey response. We provide conditions under which group differences in, for example, happiness are identified. We apply our method to an online survey and obtain evidence that happiness follows distributions for which traditional assumptions are valid. The evidence is more mixed for our preference questions, and traditional assumptions are not confirmed for our question about political attitudes.

主讲人简介：

Shuo Liu is an assistant professor of economics at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. His research interests include organizational economics, game theory, and behavioral IO. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Zurich in 2019. His research papers have been published in top economics and mathematics journals such as the RAND Journal of Economics, Theoretical Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, European Economic Review, Economic Theory, and Set-Valued and Variational Analysis。