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Colin Camerer

lines on the record: 132
first: 2024-11-14
most recent: 2024-11-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's pretty important. So, the saying we use is sometimes you want to ask the brain rather than ask the person. Uh huh. And there's some extreme ways in which that works. For example, if I show a face of somebody who's expressing fear, but only for 30 milliseconds, which is one movie frame, right? Right. And then I show a mask when you're meaning another face right on top that's neutral or in another condition I show a happy face, very enthusiastic, and then neutral mask. If you ask people, did you see a happier fearful face? They say, like, I have no idea. I didn't see it. I didn't see either one. But if you look at amygdala activity, which is a region that's known to be rapidly detecting potential threats, including fear, the amygdal activity will respond to fear, not”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, SCR skin conducted response, also called galvanic skin response. And so basically it turns out when people are aroused in any direction, it doesn't tell you good or bad, but it just tells you arousal. You have this detectable increase in sweating you can measure in the fingers.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So the term psychology, social psychology use is also called thin slicing Which is that, and the thin slices on the order of meaning a very aggregate, somewhat confident judgment is made within 10 seconds, 30 seconds. There's a big literature in interviewing about this that face-to-face interviewing, unless you're really trained to have a comparable interview for different people, the first couple of minutes of the interview, you're kind of making up your mind. At least a lot of studies indicate that.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot is going on in the first two seconds where people are thinking out of decision. That's really interesting. Not necessarily which mortgage to finance or refinance their house in or who to literally system.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you put on your ass. You can put 16 to 128 different electrodes. The signals are very weak, but the advantage of EG is it's really fast. So if you want to study something like thinking fast and slow, you know, like if I show you a picture of a person, you have a snap reaction that they're scary or they're someone you want to vote for, then ephMI is too slow because it measures these blood flow signals that take like one or two seconds to show up.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're a ball like me, that's good for science. You know, if you're a supermodel with big puffy Texas beauty pageant hair, no good. No good.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when they're really shopping, they really look at the price. So one way to tell whether people are being serious in expressing a genuine, what am I going to really do it is just something like how much time they spend looking at the price and looking back and forth. And there may be other, like if a consumer products company was trying to use fMRI or other methods, there are others that are much more portable like EEG and you can get a pair of glasses, you walk around and it records where your eyes looking. So there are things you could do outside of the confines of a campus lab. I think we would just look for things that are easy seen biomarkers of this mid-brain activity FMRI because we're never going to be able to do that at scale in a shopping mall or something.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we almost always never do a study that's just to take Celtic undergrads because we worry about the robustness across. It is true in the case of something like trying to get brain signals to brick when people will actually buy products. The other type of study we've used involves eye tracking and things like that. And it turns out that when you ask people hypothetical questions, would you buy that? You don't really have to buy this, but would you? They just don't look at the price that much.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And intelligence and everything with that limbic system. Yes, exactly. So they have all the things in the brain. They have other skills that are cortically expressed. So a lot of these MRI studies, we also use, we work pretty hard actually to get regular folks from the community who are different ages. We don't really have a representative sample, although you could try to get pretty close in Southern California.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like, if they can't do something, like a computation. Nobody can. So it's very useful for establishing bounds on rationality. You know, we often get critiques like, well, you wouldn't get bubbles if people were smart enough. Like, well, we have the smartest people and you get bubbles.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say Their lab rats, you can do whatever you want. Some of them are undergraduates, although at Caltech, they're very unusual human beings because they're actually useful. They're very useful lab rats for paper economics because the median math SET is 800. They're the most mathematically skilled people except for a perfect score, isn't it? Exactly. That's the perfect score. Like Harvey Mudd, MIT, there are other places that have similarly hyperanalytical kids.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The modern, exactly, it's like a thinking cap on top of the monkey brain, and in the midbrain, There's a stronger signal when they say yes and they actually hypothetical and it's a yes reel, there's a stronger signal than when they say yes hypothetical no real. So it's almost like way upstream in the brain If in that region they say, yes, I'm going to bite hypothetically, there's enough activity, they're going to buy it.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Modestly well. And it turns out there's two interesting markers. One is there's a very old area in the brain, old evolutionary lizard. It's called the midbrain, which is actually where all of the dopamineeric neurons live and then connect to middle areas of the brain called basoganglia that are kind of computing reward and value and then frontal cortex, which is really putting together the”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what we found was the tricky part is to predict when people say yes hypothetical, but the brain says no. Can you see?”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to buy it. We give you some money and we're going to take the price out and give you the residual money and the product and you're going to leave here with this product. Or I think some of them we mail it to them on Amazon is something we actually had products there in a box. And so the question is what's going on in the brain when they're seriously thinking about buying something for real versus hypothetical, which is like a survey.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to study close to probi, you cannot because the closterobics won't go in there. But it does give you a picture of the whole brain. And in the case of the, we did some experiments where we show people the consumer good. And in one condition, the first part of the experiment, we say, you don't have to actually buy this, but just tell us, you know, if it was on sale for this price, like yes, no, strong yes, weak yes. So we get a four-point scale. And then we surprise them and say, now we're going to show you some different products. And these are going to actually buy. So if you say yes, and we choose that one out of this bin, you get.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct, exactly. And by the way, fMRI is glamorous and fantastic, but there's lots of other methods that are used as well. It's unnatural because people are in this tube. It's very loud.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're busy, so you can often get numbers that add up to more than 100%. Yeah, I'm going to vote. No, you have 70%. Yeah, I probably won't vote 55%. That's 125%. The math doesn't math. And you see it, particularly one of the things we studied was product purchases. So when you show people new products and say, you know, you think you'd be interested in this, you get way too many yeses. And that's one reason new products fail is because somebody who's the product champion inside the firm, like in a consumer products company, looks at this polling date and says, see, see, you know, give me money to roll this out in a test market. So one of the things we have done is to try to see if we wrote a few papers on this, but I don't feel like we exactly cracked the nut, was to see if a combination of what people look at, if you measure where their eyes are looking, like how often they look back and forth between a price and a product, and maybe brain.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, I think the best pollsters know that. And so they try to phrase the question or gather some other data. But this is often called acquiescence or yes bias. Right. So when you say people, are you planning to vote? Oh, yeah, I'm planning to vote. Well, are you going to not vote because it's too, yeah, I may not vote.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so in experimental economics, one of the main rules, like commandment, is we almost always pay people, unless we can't, like with children sometimes or whatever, we almost always pay people money or something we know they value based on the decisions they made. So when we do these kind of risk assessments, again, not with clients, but say in a simple experiment for modest amounts of money, 20 bucks, 50 bucks, what we'll do is we'd say at the end we're going to pick one of the things you said you wanted and we're going to actually play that for money. If you don't tell us what you really wanted, you're going to get stuck with something you don't want.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one of my colleagues at Caltech at that time, Andreas Krauss, was studying, he was a computer scientist, so they're always on the frontier of how to get the truth faster and subject to computational constraints. Because sometimes it's not just a question of getting there, but can you do it in real time so you don't have to wait half an hour to ask the next highly informative question And so the patent was just a method that Andreis and another guy who now works at Google, I believe, Daniel Gulliban and me had worked on to apply this in a particular way. And so it was basically a software patent. There was a patent on an algorithm.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, active learning is the computer scientist term, is sometimes called dynamic adaptive learning for basically like if I was going to try to figure out how much you like risk, like you're a client and a financial advisor is asking, I might start by saying, well, here's a portfolio. Is this too risky or not risky enough? And if you say, nah, that's not risky enough. I'd rather go for more. And then I would give you a better one that has a little more risk in it. In chemistry, it's called titration. You kind of change the mixture of the chemicals. And so for each person, you're asking them a dynamic, customized set of questions to get to the best answer as quickly as possible. And that's called active learning.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the neuroeconomics to me was sort of a natural extension of behavioral economics, which was we're going to grab for any interesting data and different ways of thinking about humans outside of standard economics and kind of pull it in and try to generate a kind of hybrid. It was almost like an import-export business. I'm going to import some psychology or Dick Thayler imported from Kahneman. And what is this going to tell us about fairness and reference points and loss aversion and what have you? And neuroeconomics seemed to me like just another thing to do. Part of it is my personality is kind of like intellectual entrepreneurship. So I liked doing different things over the years. I've worked on lots of different methods and with different groups of people. And neuroeconomics was just a chance to do something even more dramatic.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I basically learned game theory in my first job as assistant professor. And game theory is similar to behavioral economics. The standard theory that everyone teaches in every introductory course is people are rational and make the best choices given what they think others will do. And they're correct guessing about what others do. Like a bunch of people who played poker with each other every Friday night for decades. They kind of know what the tells are. But we were interested in what happens before you get to this kind of what's called Nash equilibrium, where everyone has guessed correctly what everyone's going to do. And so to me, there was a huge room for understanding the psychology of strategic thinking in game theory.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that happened to be through just historical coincidence, a hotbed of great game theory. Paul Milgram was there. Banked Holmes was there. Robert Weber, who worked on lots of things on auction theory, Dave Barron, who was interested in political economy and political systems as games. So Milgram and Holstrom went on to win Nobel Prizes and went to other places. So it was sort of this incubator place that then, you know, like an incubator like Hewlett Packer and things like that where people then went off to do other stuff.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in graduate school, when I pivoted away from finance, there was a couple of psychologists Hilly Einhornen. Hogarth, who were interested in judgment decision making, they were doing things very similar to Kahneman and Diverski. Of somewhat mathematical attempts to understand actual human decision making, not really stylized like Bayes' rule and optimization. Those are good things to know, but they were interested in deviations from those and what that might tell us and what the practical value is. So that's what I ended up doing in grad school. Game theory came a little bit later because Chicago at that time.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think a lot of social scientists may feel that way. And the people who like math list stay in psychology or go to sociology or something where the mathematical structure isn't really the canon and the foundation.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So some of it was when I was in college at Johns Hopkins, I studied physics and math. And number theory was just too mind blowing, you know, for me. I'm just not going to work at that level. And then I studied psychology. And that seemed like just kind of a list of things that happened to people, but there was no unifying And then economics, which I really only took a little bit of, a lot fewer than my peers. I later competed with in grad school, was kind of in between, like the three little bears.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dick and I had just passed ships in the night, and I regret that sometimes not having just stayed and, you know, been part of a new vanguard.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I came in the late 70s, A lot of Nobel Prize winners were there Fama, Miller, Scholz. I think Fisher Black might have just left for MIT when I came. It was pre Andre Schleiffer and Rob Vishney who did a lot of interesting behavioral finance and then Dick Thaler came, I think, around 1995, 1996.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I started studying finance there and passed the prelim, which is no small feat. It's very selective. Got interested in behavioral science because finance was really obsessed with market efficiency and there was no behavioral science behavioral finance in sight at that time, but there were other folks at Chicago.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was actually kind of not quite sure, so I got in Chicago grad school for PhD in the now Booth School of Business because I had learned a little bit about finance. I took an independent study from Carl Christ, who's a famous economician. Johns Hopkins, when Gene Falmer's book, Foundations of Finance, had just come out. In fact, I literally worked in the college bookstore part-time. And I remember unpacking the box that had this FAMA book. And so I immediately bought one. And, you know, I was going to do this independent study and read through. And by the way, it really is, some books are often called foundations of blank. It really was foundations of blank. It was a summary in the 1976, right, very early days. And so Carl Christ had said, well, you should think about Chicago. That's a powerhouse place for finance.”
2024-11-14 · Masters in Business · Advancing Behavioral Economics with Colin Camerer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source