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Impact of selection bias in experiments where people treat each other

Selection biases in the participant pool generally have limited impact on inference. One way to estimate population treatment effect from effects estimated using biased samples is to check if treatment effect varies by ‘kinds of people’, and then weight the treatment effect to population marginals. So far so good. When

A Quick Scan: From Paper to Digital

Additional Note: See this presentation on paper to digital (pdf). There are two ways of converting paper to digital data: ‘human OCR and input,’ and machine-assisted. Here are some useful pointers about the latter. Scanning Since the success of so much of what comes after depends on the quality of

Gandhi And His Critics

Gandhi could never come to terms with the fact that he took leave from his dying father to have sex with his wife; his father died while he copulated. This episode produced a lifelong obsession with overcoming sexual desire and sanitation (or so Freudians will claim). Unrelatedly, Gandhi had unconventional

Capuchin Monkeys and Fairness: I Want At Least As Much As The Other

In a much heralded experiment, we see that a Capuchin monkey rejects a reward (food) for doing a task after seeing another monkey being rewarded with something more appetizing for doing the same task. It has been interpreted as evidence for our ‘instinct for fairness’. But there is more to

Sampling on MTurk

In many of the studies that use MTurk, there appears to be little strategy to sampling. A study is posted (and reposted) on MTurk till a particular number of respondents take the study. If the pool of respondents reflects true population proportions, if people arrive in no particular order, and

Bad Weather: Getting Data on Weather in a ZIP Code on a Particular Date

High-quality weather data are public. But they aren’t easy to make use of. Some thoughts and some software for finding out the weather in a particular ZIP Code on a particular day (or a set of dates). Some brief ground clearing before we begin. Weather data come from weather