Dr. David B. Huffman

Distinguished Professor of Economics

New Dataset Available: The Global Preference Survey

The GPS is a new data set produced in some recent research by myself and collaborators, see the paper "Global Evidence on Economic Preferences." Now that the paper is published the data are publicly available. The GPS provides measures of fundamental economic preferences -- time discounting, risk preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust  -- from around the world. The data include representative samples from 76 countries, with roughly 80,000 total respondents. The documentation, provided online, includes surveys in the relevant local languages.

Links

My webpage at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

​Link to St. Catherine's College, Oxford

Research

My research lies at the intersections of behavioral economics, labor economics, and personnel economics. One strand of my research has been basic research on the determinants of human decision making, especially preferences regarding risk, time, and social interactions, as well as trust and motivated beliefs. My research has shown how such preferences vary around the world as well as within diverse sets of cultures, and has explored determinants of preference differences, including the role of parental transmission. Another strand has been more applied, bringing insights from behavioral economics to central questions in labor, personnel economics, and industrial organization. Topics include how workers respond to incentives, how relational contracting operates in different institutional environments, determinants of involuntary unemployment, and mechanisms underlying gender differences in labor market outcomes. Much of my recent research has been focused on studying behavioral economics within firms, combining the internal data of firms with measures of traits and biases of employees and managers. I am particularly interested in how behavioral biases and bounded rationality may influence the strategic behaviors of firms. I use a wide variety of methodologies, including field experiments, laboratory experiments, surveys, and analysis of large, observational datasets with econometric techniques including machine learning and natural language processing.

C.V.

Curriculum Vitae

Google Scholar Statistics

(Updated  September, 2024)

​Citations: 19,631; Citations since 2019: 10,584; h-index: 33; i-10 index: 42

​​​Recent Working Papers​

• "Minds, Models, and Markets: How Managerial Cognition Shapes Pricing Strategies" (with Yi Han and Yiming Liu).
• ​"Incentive Complexity, Bounded Rationality, and Effort Provision," conditionally accepted at the American Economic Review (with Johannes Abeler and Collin Raymond).
  
• "Moral Luck: Mechanisms, Robustness, and Prevalence" (with Armin Falk and Sven Heuser).
• "The Complementary Nature of Trust and Contract Enforcement," revise and resubmit atEconomic Journal (with Bjoern Bartling, Ernst Fehr, and Nick Netzer).
• "The Pervasiveness and Robustness of Nonadditivity in Intertemporal Choice"  (with Thomas Dohmen, Armin Falk, and Uwe Sunde).

Current Work in Progress

• "Delegation and Performance: Evidence from Gas Station Managers (with Yi Han and Yiming Liu).
  
• “Investigating Gender Effects Under Competitive Workplace Incentives” (with Collin Raymond and Julia Shvets).
• “Self-reliance norms as a constraint on prosocial behavior” (with David Danz and Tymofiy Mylovanov).
• “Gendered wording in job advertisements” (with Ilya Goldin, Dor Morag and Alistair Wilson).
  
• “Mental Accounting and Healthy Food Purchases: A Field Experiment” (with Erin Bronchetti and Ellen Magenheim).​​

Publications in Journals