Happy Times: Identification from Ordered Response Data

讲座内容简介：    

Surveys that measure subjective states like happiness or preferences often generate ordinal data. Ordered response models, which are commonly used to analyze such data, suffer from a fundamental identification problem. Their conclusions depend entirely on unjustified assumptions about the distribution of a latent variable. In this paper, we propose using survey response times to solve that problem. Response times contain information about the distribution of the latent variable, even among subjects who give the same ordinal survey response. We provide conditions under which group differences in, for example, happiness are identified. We apply our method to an online survey and obtain evidence that happiness follows distributions for which traditional assumptions are valid. The evidence is more mixed for our preference questions, and traditional assumptions are not confirmed for our question about political attitudes.

讲座嘉宾简介：     

刘烁，北京大学光华管理学院应用经济学系助理教授，“光华青年人才”项目入选者。2019年毕业于瑞士苏黎世大学经济系，获博士学位。目前主要研究领域为产业与组织经济学，博弈论，以及机制设计理论。研究成果发表于国际知名学术期刊，如Theoretical Economics, RAND Journal of Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, European Economic Review, Economic Theory等。