Finding the Truth

15:40-17:00, Wednesday, April 30, 2025

I-206, Boxue Building

Han Bleichrodt is full professor of economics at the University of Alicante, Spain. Before he was full professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. His main areas of research are behavioral economics and health economics, in particular decision under risk and ambiguity, intertemporal choice and the measurement of quality of life. He has published nearly 100 articles in peer reviewed journals like Econometrica, American Economic Review, Management Science, Journal of Economic Theory, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Journal of Health Economics. He has served on the boards of various journals and was the department editor of Decision Analysis at Management Science from 2014-2018.

People are reluctant to answer sensitive questions. Methods that ensure (some) anonymity by adding random noise only give information at the aggregate level. We give a method to uncover individual views on sensitive questions. Respondents state the prevalence of the sensitive behavior in (1) their social circle and (2) the broader population. Using Bayesian updating, we derive respondents' own views from these two answers. An experiment on online videos confirms the predictions of our method. A second experiment on voting for the hard right in the 2025 German parliamentary election shows that our method predicts more sensitive behavior than directly asking respondents. Our method correctly identifies 70-75% of the sensitive responses in the two experiments.

For more information of the seminar, scan the following QR code(s) to join Tencent QQ group (904 544 292) or WeChat group named "IAER Seminar (5)", please.

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(QR code is valid until April 28, 2025)