More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Uri Gneezy
Started reading
February 1, 2019
In the past, economists have been skeptical about running controlled field experiments.
if they want to determine whether Diet Coke causes cancer in rats, they will hold “other things equal” and only vary the amount of Diet Coke consumed. Same air, same light, same type of rat.
For years, economists believed that there was no possible way to perform such tests in the “real world” because they could not easily control other important factors.
Big data is important, but it also suffers from big problems. The underlying approach relies heavily on correlations, not causality.
As a result, if you really want to end discrimination, don’t just focus on the ugly, racist side of things—that’s the wrong culprit. Instead, consider the economic incentive for the discrimination, and then look through the microscope. As it turns out, most cases of modern-day discrimination are caused by people or companies trying to increase their profits.
once we discover what people value, then we can design useful policies that influence their behavior and induce change.
But incentives are trickier than they seem. They are sophisticated tools, and they don’t always operate the way we think they will.
If you charge a lot (for example, if Rebecca had charged late parents, say, $5 per minute, as occurs in some places in the United States), people will be more likely to behave the way you want them to. So, the moral of the story is to either pay enough, or don’t pay at all.
israeli school
designing incentives that truly change behavior is challenging.
In general, women didn’t like the competitive option; in fact, they were 70 percent less likely than men to go after the competitive job. Further, the women who did apply for the highly incentivized job tended to have more impressive resumes than the men who applied for those same jobs.
when it comes to competition, men aren’t nearly as shy as women.8 A successful career as a CEO demands a high level of engagement and responsiveness to competitive situations. No wonder, then, that so few women are at the top.
Think about running as fast as you can alone, or next to someone else. If you are competitive, just having someone running next to you might motivate you to run faster and win an imaginary “race.” You just transformed an innocent situation into a competition. And if you’re less competitive, maybe you don’t care who’s next to you—you just run fast. As you might have guessed, we wanted to test whether young boys and girls would have different competitive tendencies.
Were women simply born to dislike competition, or did society influence their tastes and preferences? Was the lack of competitiveness inherent in women or a learned behavior? If the latter, exactly what did nurture—or the fact that culture might be linked to their competitive inclinations—have to do with their learning? And if the differences turned out to be socialized, would our daughters have a fair shot at succeeding in a competitive society?
