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读书有感

Social learning in Microfinance

今天偶然扫到一篇paper,三个mit jpal搞小微金融的去印度做了一个关于social learning的实验,目的就是为了看一下他们的学习过程是更符合bayesian learning呢还是DeGroot。

结论是更偏向DeGroot,大家懒到直接去用knn的原则猜一下就好了.... (落了一地冷汗)。

抄一下摘要好了。

Agents often use noisy signals from their neighbors to update their beliefs about a state of the world. The effectiveness of social learning relies on the details of how agents aggregate information from others. There are two prominent models of information aggregation in networks: (1) Bayesian learning, where agents use Bayes' rule to assess the state of the world and (2) DeGroot learning, where agents instead consider a weighted average of their neighbors' previous period opinions or actions. Agents who engage in DeGroot learning often double-count information and may not converge in the long run. We conduct a lab experiment in the field with 665 subjects across 19 villages in Karnataka, India, designed to structurally test which model best describes social learning. Seven subjects were placed into a network with common knowledge of the network structure. Subjects attempted to learn the underlying (binary) state of the world, having received independent identically distributed signals in the first period. Thereafter, in each period, subjects made guesses about the state of the world, and these guesses were transmitted to their neighbors at the beginning of the following round. We structurally estimate a model of Bayesian learning, relaxing common knowledge of Bayesian rationality by allowing agents to have incomplete information as to whether others are Bayesian or DeGroot. Our estimates show that, despite the flexibility in modeling learning in these networks, agents are robustly best described by DeGroot-learning models wherein they take a simple majority of previous guesses in their neighborhood.

 

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读书有感

英文写作的用词原则

要说学英文最难学的是什么,我觉得听说读写的排序应该是 写 > 说 > 听 > 读,基本就是越需要自己主动的就越难...尤其是英文作为这么一门规则乱七八糟的语言(反正中文也没好哪儿去),很多东西是需要看到了知道了记住了...没太多规律什么。到后面其实也有超越语言本身的一些问题:比如如何遣词造句、如何安排段落、如何构建整个的文章结构。到这里基本就和语言无关了,用中文我也没有做的很好。所以觉得还是需要花一些时间在写作上面。

最近跟了edx一门课:English Grammar and Style, 以及在看一本书 The Elements of Style。其实这门课是给英语母语的人开的、而不仅仅是非母语者(English as a foreign language, EFL)。很多英语母语的人不知道音标、不知道语法,我跟他们聊linguistics 的时候他们也会听的一愣一愣的。但是跟一些英文写的很优雅的人聊天,就会发现他们其实对英文语法也是有很深入的了解的,我想这也是为什么他们写出来可以那么优雅的缘故吧。想想惭愧的是我也不知道中文的语法应该是什么,到底是中文没有什么语法规则呢(不太可能),还是我写的不够好呢(我觉得是我写的不够好吧....)?

第一课基本就是在说一些非常基本的英文语法。说来惭愧,我从来分不清什么时候用the 什么时候不用....也其实不太拎的清楚什么时候用that 什么时候用which...看了无数的规则教程什么还是脑子里没概念(语感),囧。

这里抄录一下一些原则:如何在单词的阶段构建文章的可信度。看完之后觉得真的好难啊!尤其像我这么喜欢啰哩啰嗦的人....

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事儿关经济 读书有感

同桌的你

还有一篇也挺好玩的,想起了同桌的你?基本就是说,跟异性混的多的话数理成绩会下降哦。哎,说好的什么“绿衣捧砚催题卷,红袖添香伴读书”呢?

The Girl Next Door: The Effect of Opposite Gender
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics Vol. 7, Issue 3 -- July 2015
Parents are concerned about the in influence of friends during adolescence. Using the gender composition of schoolmates in an individual's close neighborhood as an instrument for the gender composition of an individual's self-reported friendship network, this paper finds that the share of opposite gender friends has a sizable negative effect on high school GPA. The effect is found across all subjects for students over the age of sixteen, but is limited to mathematics and science for younger students. Self-reported difficulties getting along with the teacher and paying attention in class are important mechanisms through which the effect operates.
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事儿关经济 读书有感

另一种歧视?

今天又扫到一篇很有意思的paper,基本就是说,如果企业看不到应聘者的名字,那么少数族裔被选中面试的可能性就更低。这好像和美国大学录取如出一辙——在学校里比较少见的族裔还是很沾光的。

Unintended Effects of Anonymous Résumés
Luc Behaghel, Bruno Crépon and Thomas Le Barbanchon, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics Vol. 7, Issue 3 -- July 2015

他们的摘要总结的很好(看完就知道他们干了什么了)。

We evaluate an experimental program in which the French public employment service anonymized resumes for firms that were hiring. Firms were free to participate or not; participating firms were then randomly assigned to receive either anonymous resumes or name-bearing ones. We find that participating firms become less likely to interview and hire minority candidates when receiving anonymous resumes. We show how these unexpected results can be explained by the self-selection of firms into the program and by the fact that anonymization prevents the attenuation of negative signals when the candidate belongs to a minority.
所以名字好重要.... 这年头名字继承了太多的信息,大家总会多少不自觉的从名字里面挖掘出一些含金量。
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读书有感

最近几篇社交网络分析 (SNS)

最近关注了一下SNS这边的研究,主要是Linkedin, Quota 和 Facebook。

先贴一下链接:

简单提纲挈领一下这三篇都是干啥的。

  • linkedin那篇主要是说在一个社交网络中,设计一个随机实验是比较困难的,主要是有"溢出效应(spill-over effect)"或者其他network effect,所以就不满足独立同分布的a/b test 假设了。比如,linkedin改变了一个人首页的feed,然后他评论或者转发了一下,他的朋友(control)组里面的也就可能看到;或者说linkedin给一些用户首页展现"endorsement",那这个显然是有溢出效应的(甲 endorse 乙,乙也很有可能反过来endorse 甲)。所以他们做的主要是三件事:分析简单纯随机a/b test的不足、建立数学模型并数值模拟基于已知网络结构的网络效应、采用聚类(clustering or particition)的办法随机实验各个小群体。
  • facebook那篇跟容易让人想起来他们以前那次在大选之前拿用户feed做实验。我总感觉facebook有一群潜伏的政治学研究者...这次这篇发在《科学》上的倒是没有做实验,只是分析了一下朋友们之间的政治观点异同。此外,他们还画了一下不同政治观点(保守、中立、自由)群体的网络样子。
  • quota那篇相对来讲就稍微没那么成熟。我跑到那个meetup去了所以大概说一下idea。quora关注的是如何让用户找到感性的问题、以及如何找到最合适的人来回答。所以他们很关心一个问题能在network里面传递多远、多久。他们有一些social channels、比如你关注的人的动态、你关注的话题的动态之类的;还有一些非social的channel,比如google,比如摘要邮件。所以他们就来分析,是不是follower越多的人的回答越容易得到更多的upvote(类似于点赞)呢?答案是肯定的,但是随着时间的衰减social channel的作用越来越弱,最终收敛到60%还是多少来着。其他的分析也大致跟此相关,描述性分析为主。

总结:sns现在做的越来越细致、更注重于问题本身而不是炫技。大致的问题主要有:信息是怎么在社交网络传递的?不同群体之间的差别与联系?人们是怎么被网络中的变化所影响的?这种影响如何量化?如果要做实验,怎么控制溢出效应?如果要做模拟,怎么有效的利用各种信息和已知的网络结构?

一点点在推进科学的进步的感觉?