[I]ncreasing the multiplier on amount sent by the “trustor” from two to three decreases the amount of money returned by the receiver by a little over one standard deviation. This means that, at least in part, second movers take into account the ‘‘size of the pie’’ by adjusting downwards what they return to the senders.
From a meta-analysis of trust game results by Johnson and Mislin (2011): ungated link.
Haykal Bafana in the NYT on the Houthi takeover in Yemen:
After anti-government protests in 2011, Ali Abdullah Saleh, then the president, came under pressure from the United Nations and agreed to step down. Elections were held and Mr. Saleh’s vice president, Mr. Hadi, the only candidate on the ballot, was elected president…
As the political transition meandered along, violence became dreadfully routine. The Yemeni state disintegrated in slow motion…
[N]orthern Yemen fell into a widespread state of war between the Houthis and the Yemeni military. Throughout a six-month Houthi onslaught last year, Mr. Hadi refused to send army reinforcements to fight the Houthi militia in the north…Mr. Hadi’s repeated failure to punish Houthi aggression and his tepid calls for peace were read as weakness…
Within six months, the Yemeni state had lost control of huge amounts of their military hardware, as well as four northern provinces, to the Houthis.
Army leadership resented Mr. Hadi for his refusal to punish the Houthis, despite the deaths of hundreds of soldiers. That’s why, in September, it was hardly a surprise when the Houthi militia entered Sana and established control. Military units refused to fight the Houthi advance, while others, perhaps sympathetic to the Houthi cause, were quietly supportive. The capital fell as Yemen’s army gave Mr. Hadi a taste of his own policy of appeasement.
Article link
The New York Times on concerns about the Nigerian military’s inability to defeat Boko Haram, which is generating support for a Buhari bid for the presidency:
“The resources meant for the military don’t go to the military; the bullets and boots don’t go to the soldiers,” Ms. Usman said. “And what is happening to security, you see it in all the sectors.”
“The support we’re giving” to Mr. Buhari “is for ending the insurgency,” she added. “And so no more children are abducted.”
A retired general in the crowd of supporters, Alhassan Usman, who is not related to Ms. Usman, agreed, expressing anger that Boko Haram had gained the upper hand over Nigeria’s soldiers.
“The issue is lack of discipline; the commander has eaten his money,” he said, arguing that officers take money meant for soldiers, who then see little reason to obey orders.
Article link.
In the current PS, Luke Keele (link) makes a great point about the need for journals to let researchers take existing theories and subject them to multiple rounds of empirical scrutiny:
Of course, there is nothing wrong with new theories; however, I believe that an overemphasis on theory can impede the ability of the discipline to establish causal relationships. One point of emphasis in the identification revolution is that causal inference is difficult. A series of regression models is hardly the last word in whether a causal theory holds. Within causal inference, it is generally understood that only a series of different studies using disparate research designs can provide solid evidence for a causal relationship. This understanding implies that, as opposed to a single test, a theory requires a number of tests from different research designs. We might assert that whereas theory is critically necessary, too many theories might be harmful. It is probably the case that the gain from an incomplete test of a new theory is less than the gain from a new test of an existing theory.
Economics provides a useful example. The question of whether attending college increases income is one of long-standing interest to economists. The theory behind the question is relatively simple. Although I hesitate to state that the causal hypothesis that college leads to higher incomes is definitively settled, a review of the many different research designs used makes a convincing case for a causal effect. If all of the researchers conducting these studies had been told by reviewers that new theory was needed, little progress would have been made.
When we overvalue novel theories, we tend to dismiss attempts to answer old questions with new research designs. We can value papers with new theories and little or no empirics. We also can value papers with little in the way of new theory but that present novel research designs that provide new empirical evidence about causal relationships. We could argue convincingly that both topics require such attention that it may be difficult to present both novel theory and empirics in the same paper. Currently, I would state that, in general, a paper that does not engage in new theory development will have a difficult time being published in a top journal. I don’t think that is healthy. If we really want researchers to clearly establish causal relationships that is often worth doing alone in a single paper.
In my (and Luke’s) home discipline of political science, I have frequently seen reviewers at top journals suggesting rejection for papers because they don’t think the theoretical contribution is novel enough, even if the research design is compelling. (I am not talking about reviews for my own work either, but that of my much more capable colleagues who have discussed their reviews with me.) But journals seem to be okay with papers that propose new theories with no empirical tests whatsoever. Weird, isn’t it?
I am not saying pure theory papers shouldn’t be published—quite the contrary in fact. What makes sense is some division of labor in the discipline. I recognize the importance of pure theory papers. I also recognize the importance of compelling empirical work that offers a new and credible test of an existing theoretical claim. The usual refrain that I hear when I say this is that “top economics journals don’t seem to have this problem,” and with that I agree. I wonder why there is such a difference.
I agree with pretty much everything else in Luke’s paper too. It is part of a symposium on whether “big data,” “causal inference,” and “formal theory” are conflicting trends, an obviously ridiculous proposition, but one that triggered some nice essays by the contributors.
An enduring question in social science is how people come to “identify” with a group and what implications that has for the individual’s behavior as well as the role that the group plays in society. Take for example “identification” with a political party followed by taking actions that promote the influence of the party. As it happens I was recently having a discussion with a graduate student about research on processing of coming to “identify” with a group. You might be thinking that this is all pretty abstract, and even though we hear and maybe even use “identify” all the time, what do we really mean by it?
The seminal work on identity by Akerlof and Kranton (e.g., this or this) provides a great framework for thinking through this. From their framework, identities are social categories that come with ideals and prescribed behaviors. To the extent that one has “internalized” an identity, one feels real pain or anxiety from betraying those ideals or prescribed behaviors. Understanding identity in these terms implies meaningful “identity change” is probably not so easy: it would require an internal rewiring such that behaviors that once produced anxieties now do not. This makes me wonder what is the state of research on the physiology of anxiety due to betrayal of ideals.