Category: Code/Data

Act-Sampling Bias and the Shrouding of Repeat Offending (2017)

Co-authored with Ian Ayres and Jessica Ladd.  In this paper, we explain how drawing naive conclusions from “act sampling”—sampling people’s actions instead of sampling the population—can make us grossly underestimate the proportion of repeat actors. We call this “act-sampling bias.” This bias is especially severe when the sample of known acts is small, as in sexual assault, which is among the least likely of crimes to be reported.  Virginia Law Review Online 94.

The widget for this paper, written in Javascript using D3.js, is available here.

Stereotypes Are More Powerful When People Like to Agree with Each Other (2016)

I find that among 119 academic fields, the more skewed the citation distribution of papers published in the field, the lower the percentage of doctoral recipients who are women. If the citation distribution in a field is more skewed, a smaller percentage of papers receive most of the citations, which indicates a greater preference to agree on which papers should be cited. This empirical result illustrates the argument, which I make in a game-theoretic model, that stereotypes are more powerful when people like to agree with each other.

The data used in this paper is available here.

Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (2001, 2013)

How do political ceremonies help establish authority?  How can a public declaration have political consequences even when it says something that everyone already knows? Why do ritual songs and speech typically involve lots of repetition?   Why were circular forms considered ideal for public festivals during the French revolution?  Why was the advertising during the Barbara Walters television interview of Monica Lewinsky dominated by Internet companies?  Why are advertisers willing to pay more per viewer to buy commercial time on the most popular television programs?  Why are close friendships important for collective action even though people typically “reach” many more people through casual acquaintances?  How is the “panopticon” prison design also a ritual structure?  In what sense is everyone separately reading their own copy of the morning newspaper a ritual?  How is historical experience a resource for collective action?  How do rituals and media events help create social identity?  This book (essentially a more in-depth version of the “Culture, Circles, and Commercials” paper below) tries to answer these and other questions with a single argument, trying to find a common thread among a variety of cultural and social practices usually thought disparate.  Princeton University Press.

The television advertising data used in this book is available here.

Structure and Strategy in Collective Action (1999)

This paper considers both structural and strategic influences on collective action.  Each person in a group wants to participate only if the total number participating is at least her threshold; people use a social network to communicate their thresholds.  People are strategically rational in that they are completely rational and also take into account that others are completely rational.  In several examples, I show that strategic rationality itself has structural implications otherwise not discernible.  Results include: cliques form the common knowledge crucial for collective action; dispersion of “insurgents,” people strongly predisposed toward collective action, can be good for collective action but too much dispersion can be bad; classic “bandwagon” models overstate the fragility of collective action.  American Journal of Sociology 105 (1999): 128–156.

The Mathematica program which is used to compute the examples in this paper is available here.

Farsighted Coalitional Stability (1994)

I define the largest consistent set, a solution concept which applies to situations in which coalitions freely form but cannot make binding contracts, act publicly, and are fully “farsighted” in that a coalition considers the possibility that, once it acts, another coalition might react, a third coalition might in turn react, and so on, without limit.  I establish weak nonemptiness conditions and apply it to strategic and coalitional form games and majority rule voting.  I argue that it improves on the von Neumann-Morgenstern stable set as it is usually defined but is consistent with a generalization of the stable set as in the theory of social situations.  Journal of Economic Theory (1994) 63: 299–325.

The Mathematica program which computes the largest consistent set is available here.