Abstract: Consider two theses about causation: (1) Causes are connected to their effects by way of mediating causal mechanisms or processes. (2) Scientific inquiry aims (at least in part) at discerning and describing the causal structure of our world. Some of the best contemporary work on causation claims—often implicitly, but sometimes quite explicitly—that, in giving an account of causation, we should sacrifice (1) for the sake of producing an account that makes the best sense of (2). I will first try to...

Abstract: The Quicksort and Bubble Sort algorithms are commonly implemented procedures in computer science for sorting a set of numbers from low to high in an efficient number of processes using only pairwise comparisons. Because of such algorithms’ reliance on pairwise comparison, they lend themselves to any implementation where a simple judgment requires selecting a winner. We show how such algorithms, adapted for stochastic measurements, are an efficient way to harness human ”crowdsourced” coders who are...

Abstract: Most of the literature on grassroots campaigning focuses on mobilizing potential supporters to turn out to vote. The actual ability of partisan campaigns to boost support by changing voter preferences is unclear. We present the results of a field experiment the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) ran during the 2013 Australian Federal Election. The experiments were designed to minimize the conservative (the Coalition) vote as part of one of the largest and most extensively documented voter persuasion...

Presenter: Stefan Hoderlein 

Abstract: This is an overview about own recent econometric work related to the modeling of heterogeneity in applied consumer demand models. The focus will be on non-parametric random coefficient models. The main application will come from estimating gasoline demand; in particular, estimating the distribution of welfare effects of a 5% gasoline price change.