Meet YINS Seminar: Peter Aronow & Florian Ederer
Weekly Seminar
Event time:
Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location:
Yale Institute for Network Science
17 Hillhouse Avenue, 3rd Floor
New Haven, CT
06511
Event description:
First Speaker: Florian Ederer
Assistant Professor of Economics, Yale School of Management
“Understanding Mechanisms Underlying Peer Effects: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Financial Decisions”
Talk Summary: Using a high-stakes field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we implement a novel design to separately identify two channels of social influence in financial decisions, both widely studied theoretically. We find that both social learning and social utility channels have statistically and economically significant effects on investment decisions.
Second Speaker: Peter Aronow
Assistant Professor, Departments of Political Science and Biostatistics, Yale University
“Estimation and Inference for Randomized Experiments on Social Networks”
Talk Summary: I present a design-based framework for estimating causal effects for randomized experiments performed on networks. I develop general conditions for consistency of Horvitz-Thompson-type estimators, as well as a basis for asymptotic inference. This framework is applied to a large-scale schools-based randomized experiment that includes comprehensive social network measurement.