Blog 2018

Video illustration of recent paper

My recently published paper, 'Immaterial and monetary gifts in economic transactions: evidence from the field', has now been made more accessible to the interested scientific community and the general public by ways of a Youtube video. Created by the University of Innsbruck group around my co-author Michael Kirchler, the video shows how being nice to the salesperson (by giving a compliment, or tipping while ordering) nets customers more ice cream or heavier Durum Doner.

ProSieben Galileo report

I recently had my eleven minutes of fame when I featured in a report in ProSieben's (a TV station) Galileo magazine. Galileo presents news from the realm of science and technology to a general audience of between 1m and 2m German-speaking viewers. In this case, we did a little experiment to explore which 'tricks' a waiter can use to earn larger tips. See for yourself how that worked out!

Successful grant application

A joint grant application by Thomas Stöckl (MCI Management Center Innsbruck, serving as principal investigator) and myself has received funding by the Austrian National Bank (OeNB). Titled Putting a spotlight on insider trading legislation - A cross-examination using laboratory markets, the research project consists of three separate studies of insider trading and the effect of legislation. Specifically, they focus on the effect on the possibility to short sell on informed and uninformed traders' behavior and profits, on traders' choice of a regulated vs. a non-regulated market, and on whether traders themselves would vote for legislation against informed trading or not.

Funded with € 147,000, the project will run for three years and will bring together pre- and post-doc researchers in Graz and Innsbruck.

Using DataCamp in class

This fall term, I will be using DataCamp for the classroom in one of my courses. I have been teaching the statistics software R in a number of my classes in the past few semesters using a self-created set of introductory exercises. This will, however, be only my second time using DataCamp, and the first time I will be using a self-created course chapter.

DataCamp lets users learn programming languages and software using a cool hands-on learning approach in which users learn about the language and apply it seamlessly in the same interface. Apart from offering several excellent free courses, I have now become aware that they provide a full classroom management system and access to their premium content for free for academics. So I have assembled a custom-made curriculum, consisting of chapters from a premium course plus my first self-generated DataCamp course, basically an introduction to simple plots in R. Check it out and let me know what you think and what I can improve!

Do you have experience using DataCamp for the classroom, or in creating your own DataCamp courses? I would be interested in sharing notes and best-use examples.

New paper in Journal of Economic Psychology

A joint paper with Thomas Stöckl, titled "Catch me if you can. Can human observers identify insiders in asset markets?", has recently been published (open access) in volume 67 of the Journal of Economic Psychology. This is the second paper resulting from a large experiment into the behavior of insiders and uninformed traders in markets variably characterized either no regulation or by regulation forbidding trading by informed insiders. While the first paper focused on the behavior of traders and on the effect on market-level variables, the new paper discusses whether and how market observers succeed in identifying informed traders solely from studying market trading data.

Stöckl, T., Palan, S., 2018. Catch me if you can. Can human observers identify insiders in asset markets?, Journal of Economic Psychology 67, 1–17, DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2018.04.004.

New paper in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance

A joint paper with Christian Schitter, titled "Prolific.ac — A subject pool for online experiments", has today been published (open access) in volume 17 of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance. It is concerned with a platform for recruiting participants for online experiments, a topic of growing relevance for the entire social sciences. After briefly discussing key advantages and challenges of online experiments relative to lab experiments, we trace the platform’s historical development, present its features, and contrast them with requirements for different types of social and economic experiments.

Palan, S., Schitter, C., 2018. Prolific.ac—A subject pool for online experiments, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance 17, 22–27, DOI: 10.1016/j.jbef.2017.12.004.

(Note that the paper was accepted last year, before I became co-editor of this journal.)

New editor position with Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance

At the beginning of the year, I have started my tenure as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance (JBEF). Founded only in 2014, JBEF welcomes full-length and short letter papers in the areas of behavioral finance and experimental finance. The focus is on rapid dissemination of high-impact research in these areas. The journal has been growing nicely and is on track to receive an impact factor in 2019. The current journal metrics are a CiteScore of 1.13, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of 0.978 and a SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) of 0.430.

I look forward to an exciting time doing my best to promote JBEF and, together with the second Co-Editor-in-Chief, Michael Dowling, to lead it to become a well-respected field journal in the near future. If you work in the field, please consider JBEF for your next paper.