Social, Behavioral and Experimental Economics Seminar: Sherry Li, University of Arkansas (U-M Visiting Scholar)
Abstract
We study how communication protocols affect agreement and inference when people observe different noisy evidence about competing narratives. In a laboratory experiment, one of two narratives about the gender wage gap is randomly selected as the true data-generating process. Participants observe independent private samples, choose the narrative they believe to be true, communicate anonymously with a partner facing the same true narrative, and choose again. We compare free- form chat with direct data sharing, which removes friction in transmitting private evidence, and a pre-chat task that prompts participants to articulate their inference strategy. Free-form chat generates high consensus among initially disagreeing pairs but little improvement in true-narrative correctness. Data sharing shifts choices toward pair-level evidence. Articulation increases selection of the narrative best aligned with participants’ private data but reduces consensus. The findings show that communication protocols shape consensus, inference quality, and recovery of the true data-generating process in distinct ways.
About the SBEE Seminar Series
The Social, Behavioral and Experimental Economics seminar series brings together a community of economics scholars from three units at the University of Michigan — the School of Information, the Department of Economics and the Ross Business School — whose research aims to broaden the understanding of the social, economic and political consequences of real-life decisions and behaviors.
Top researchers from around the globe come to Michigan to present their work at the SBEE seminar series, exploring the intersection of economics, psychology, computer science and information science.
The seminar series is organized by U-M faculty members Yan Chen (UMSI), Alain Cohn (UMSI), Erin Krupka (UMSI), Stephen Leider (Ross), Christine Exley (Econ), A. Yesim Orhun (Ross), Tanya Rosenblat (UMSI), Karthik Srinivasan (UMSI) and Basit Zafar (Econ). Todd Stuart and Robin Kocher serve as seminar coordinators.
Featured Speaker
Sherry Li
University of Arkansas (U-M Visiting Scholar)
Sherry Li is Lewis E. Epley Jr. Professor in Economics and the director of the Behavioral Business Research Lab of the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. She specializes in experimental and behavioral research spanning broadly defined public economics, labor economics, and development economics. Her research has been published in economics journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Development Economics, and Experimental Economics. Li currently serves as a co-guest-editor for the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Special Issue on Social Dilemmas and an associate editor for Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. She previously served as an associate editor for Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from 2011 to 2016 and for Economic Inquiry from 2010 to 2023. Li received her PhD in economics from the University of Michigan. Before she joined the University of Arkansas, she was on the faculty of Economics at the University of Texas—Dallas and served as the director of the Negotiations Center.
Contact: [email protected]