Postcards from the NSF

We provide an overview of the workings of the National Science Foundation and the proposal review process, as well as some guidance in writing proposals for funding.NSF, National Science Foundation, proposals, review process

Postcards from the NSF

We provide an overview of the workings of the National Science Foundation and the proposal review process, as well as some guidance in writing proposals for funding.

An Experimental Evaluation of the Serial Cost Sharing Rule

This paper proposes an experimental test of the strategic equilibrium properties of the serial cost sharing rule originally proposed by Shenker (1990) and then analyzed by Moulin and Shenker (1992). We report measure of the performance and efficiency of the serial mechanism by comparing the choices and payoffs attained by the subjects to the expected first best allocations. Experimental evidence shows that, while some learning is needed, the serial mechanism leads to almost efficient allocations.

Impure Altruism in Dictators’ Giving

We design an experiment to test whether the behavior of dictators can be rationalized by the impurely altruistic utility function. By giving the recipients an endowment of varying levels, we create an environment that allows for observable differences in behavior depending upon whether pure or impure altruism is the primary motivation. We find that the behavior of 66 percent of the dictators can be rationalized by the impurely altruistic utility function, while only 40 percent of the dictators make choices that are consistent with the purely altruistic utility function.Dictator Game, Impure Altruism, Incomplete Crowding Out

Raising Revenues for Charity: Auctions versus Lotteries

We report an experiment conducted to gain insight into factors that may affect revenues in English auctions and lotteries, two commonly used charity fund-raising formats. In particular, we examine how changes in the marginal per capita return (MPCR) from the public component of bidding, and how changes in the distribution of values affect the revenue properties of each format. Although we observe some predicted comparative static effects, the dominant result is that lottery revenues uniformly exceed English auction revenues. The similarity of lottery and English auction bids across sales formats appears to drive the excess lottery revenues.auctions, lotteries, charitable giving, experimental tests

Financiamiento y provisión de bienes públicos. Un modelo de negociación

In this paper we represent the process of financing and providing public goods with a fulI-information bargaining model where both supply and demand sides are explicitly considered. In this bargaining process a consumer-voter and a bureaucrat negotiate the level of provision and the total tax-payment of the public good. After characterizing the feasible set of transactions and defining the efficient set of outcomes, we consider the generalized Nash bargaining solution for this game. We find that the observed result depends upon the negotiation strength of the players and that in general it will be a compromise between the extreme cases analyzed in the literature.

Day 2 - The Proposal Pre-Mortem: Responding to Reviewer Comments Before You Get Them

No one wants to receive negative comments from grant reviewers. So what skills and strategies can you build to guard yourself against such reviews. In this workshop, we will discuss grant panelist comments from various sponsors, and the range of decisions that must be made when faced with some of the most challenging concerns: conflicting comments; vague comments; critique about science that is well-justified in the narrative; etc. Workshop participants will then work small groups to meet two objectives. First, attendees will analyze reviewer comments to develop a response strategy. Participants can bring their own comments and questions for feedback from the group/moderators. Second, in light of the reviewers’ comments, investigators will discuss how to look ahead and assess the ways in which the proposed projects could fail at the review stage. They will create a pre-submission grant writing plan to navigate around such critique. This workshop is limited to 20 participant

Information Aggregation with Heterogeneous Traders

The efficient market hypothesis predicts that asset prices reflect all available information. A seminal experiment reported that contingent claim markets could yield market outcomes consistent with information aggregation when traders hold heterogeneous state-contingent values. However, a recent experiment found the rational expectation model outperformed the prior information and maxi-min models in contingent claim markets when traders hold homogeneous values despite the no trade equilibrium in that setting. But that same study failed to replicate the original result calling into question when, if ever, prices reliably reflect the aggregate information of traders with heterogeneous values. In this paper, we show contingent claim markets can robustly yield prices consistent with the efficient market hypothesis when traders hold heterogeneous values in certain circumstances. The key distinction between our environment and that of the previous studies is that we consider trader values that are correlated and not too dissimilar