Economic Data Engineering
My research for the past twenty years has focused on symbiotic advances in measurement and modeling, which I refer to as economic data engineering. Life-cycle data engineering involves research teams constructing survey instruments to measure expectations and contingent behaviors in all life phases. Information theoretic data engineering designs enriched choice data to measure what decision makers like, what they know, and why they don’t know more.
Advancing environmental exposure assessment science to benefit society
We highlight recent progress in the granular measurement of air pollutants and individual-level exposures and show how this has enabled focused local policy actions.
Economic theory and psychological data: Bridging the divide
Proposes methods of data engineering in which new model constructs are introduced in parallel with corresponding new data forms. Implementations since that time relate to reward prediction errors, search, incomplete information, and rational inattention.
The social discount rate
What discount rate should be applied to social investments? It is standard to use the market interest rate, thereby respecting private preferences. We introduce a utility function that allows for retrospective time inconsistency: possible regret at past high levels of spending. When this is present, we argue that policymakers should be more patient than private citizens, whose choices define the most short‐sighted Pareto optimum.
The supply of information by a concerned expert
How much information should a policy maker pass on to an ill‐informed citizen? In this paper, we address this classic question of Crawford and Sobel (1982) in a setting in which beliefs impact utility, as in Kreps and Porteus (1978). We show that this question cannot be answered using a utility function with standard revealed preference foundations. We use the psychological expected utility model of Caplin and Leahy (2001) to capture preferences, and the psychological game model of Geanakoplos et al. (1989) to capture strategic interactions.