YouSaid · the spoken record

John List

lines on the record: 137
first: 2022-01-26
most recent: 2022-01-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Okay, great. So I'm on the schedule to give a keynote talk alongside a guy who ends up winning the Nobel Prize and development economics named Angus Deaton. He's there to criticize field experiments, and I'm there to be the supporter of field experiments. I get picked up at my house here in Hyde Park, Chicago, because the meetings are downtown Chicago. Just happen to get lucky that year. The meetings rotate to a different big city every year. Okay, so the Uber car picks me up. And as usual, I'm still working on my slides. I look at my watch and it's roughly noon, and I'm supposed to be on stage at 1230. So the driver starts taking me down there. And we get about three quarters of the way. Look at my watch, and I'm like, this is perfect. I have to just finish this last slide. I'm going to walk in. These slides are going to be great.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is kind of a perfect example of, I think the leadership of Uber and how they were open to science. So I'm scheduled to give a keynote talk at our big annual meetings. They're called the American Economic Association meetings. So these are annual meetings that take place every January.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as you know, it was pretty rocky at Uber when I was there. In fact, I think there's a new show coming out called Like Super Pumped or something.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of like $50, $100, $150, or 25%, 45%, 70%. A lot of times people say, those are out of my range. So I'm going to do zero. So you don't want to do too high. You don't want to do too low because then you might be leaving money on the table for the driver. So it becomes an art. And it's an art that you can only figure out with field experiments. A lot of those 5%, 10%, 20%, those are individual specific. So that doesn't fit with just everyone. Sometimes the low it means high for somebody else or a really high set of presets is low for somebody else. So just like the price and the various other pieces of the algorithm, an optimal tipping scheme. Will take account of the consumer's traits and how they've tipped in the past. Okay. So another line of research that we worked on at Uber was what I call the economics of apologies.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How should you do the presets at the bottom of your app? You have zero, one dollar or two dollars, or should it be one, two, and four? Or should it be 0%, 5%, 20%? We have all those configurations. And kind of the bottom line is you want that. You want there to be a choice. You don't want to have people fill in the number. You want there to be a box that you can check. But make sure the boxes aren't too high because if they're too high, you're going to get a zero.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Calls. Uber calls. And Uber says we understand what happened at Amazon.com because of Jeff Holden. Jeff Holden was at Amazon.com back then and then he ended up leaving for Groupon. He was at groupon for a while and then he went to Uber. And when TK wanted a chief economist, he ended up talking to his exec team, Jeff Holden's one of them. And Jeff said, you know, there's this guy who we really liked at Amazon. And he wouldn't come because of this restriction or constraint that he said he's an academic and he wants to publish some of the work. And TK said, well, if he's good, let's bring him in and he can publish some of his work. And to his credit, TK stayed true to that promise. So, not only around tipping, we have two academic papers about the economics of tipping, questions like”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economics team, and you're going to be the guy who hires all the economists. And he says, let me tell you about this cloud thing. He goes, you're going to help me price the cloud. Like, I don't even know what that is. And I just pretended I did, but I honestly didn't know anything about it. So, okay, so TK.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in the end, I'm a scientist. And I've always thought that my calling was that to use the world as your lab is a great opportunity to make the world a better place. And I really felt I could help Amazon. I really did. But in the end, they just couldn't get over the hurdle of I needed to publish an academic journals as a scientist because I not only wanted to solve Amazon.com's problems, I wanted to solve the world's problems. And I certainly get it. Their basic premise was, look, we want you to come in and help us make a ton of money. And at the time, he was talking about something called the cloud, which I didn't even know what that was. In fact, he goes, John, the two next big things are going to be the cloud and the...”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, Tim, Tim, Tim. So if I had to go back, I still think I can honestly say this. I would do the same thing today. I did give up millions of dollars, no doubt about that.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Early on, Amazon, Jeff Bezos came to me and asked me to be their chief economist. And boy, oh boy, oh boy, whenever I go back and look at that contract, it was a contract that was heavily laden with options.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continue, but there are all these kinds of facts like this, you know, the average trip, only about 15% of trips are tipped. And conditional on tipping, the average tip is about 10, 12% of the fare. So you do have things like a bigger bill is a bigger tip. That's what we have in restaurants too, where people tip 20%. But the big thing about tipping is people tip a lot more if it's face-to-face versus when it's anonymous. So the way we did tipping at Uber was you don't get asked to tip until after the ride is done and you're removed in space and time from the driver. We did that on purpose because TK said, John, I don't want tipping to be a tax on riders. I want it to be something that is truly done for exceptional service. We want to separate it in space and time, and then that's what we got is, you know, roughly 15% of trips are tipped.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The female drivers are younger. So, what happens is the older female drivers, say 60 years old and beyond, those female drivers are tipped the same as the male drivers in that age group. But the big difference is with the 21 to 25-year-old drivers where females earn about 6% more in tips than the males do. And it's all driven by male riders. It is sort of an interesting fact. Now I'm going to let your imagination, Tim, go with that about why that happens. I don't want to go into that, Carol. I'll let your imagination go. I don't have to imagine very long.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because in the charitable giving game, nine out of 10 people give to a charitable cause at least once every year. But when you think about the Uber experience, only 1% of people tip every time. And interestingly, roughly 60% Never tip. Now, in the middle, of course, are the sometimes tippers. So we did this big data grab from our experiments. So now we're talking about 23 million observations, a big data set. And we can look at a lot of averages. And what you find are things like Men tip female drivers more than they tip male drivers. That's a fact, especially when”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are sort of some interesting facts about what happens in that Uber car. A first fact is that if your listen want to join the 1%, a lot of times people say, I want to be in the 1%. Now, in this case, only 1% of writers tip every trip. That kind of blew my mind.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, it's just the opposite in tipping. So you can say, well, where's John getting his tipping data from? I was a chief economist at Uber back in 2017. And TK, Travis Kellenick, came to me and said, John, you need to help us keep the drivers in Uber. And my solution back then was let's roll out tipping on the app. So we rolled out tipping on the app. My team at Uber was called Ubernomics. So team UberNomics helped roll out tipping. And what we find there is across the board, men tip a lot more than women. So there's sort of this interesting dynamic that in charitable giving where you do it face to face or you do it to be recognized, women are giving a lot more than men. But remember on the Uber app, what happens is you do it anonymously and you don't do it face to face. And in that case, men actually give more than women in tips.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Driver or tipping a waiter or what have you. And it's sort of interesting because sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. One example is when you look at the charitable giving data. So I have the IRS data. So I have everyone's tax form from like 2008 to 2017. So I can explore all kinds of different cuts of those data. And I can tell you that as it turns out, at each income percentile, so if you say the average income earner in the United States is like $58,000, if you look at all people who make that amount of money, women give a lot more than men in that income bucket. So you look across all of the income buckets, and a fact is that women in every income bucket give more than men to charitable causes. So now you'd say, okay, that must be also true in tipping. It's not.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you look at what drives a man to give versus a woman, a man is driven a lot by the tax advantages that charitable giving gives you. That's called the price effect in giving. Whereas women are driven more by altruism and social pressure. So now these become two sort of important features that you might say, well, that affects charitable giving. And that's about generosity. But what about other parts of society like tipping? Can we take what we learn about the generosity to the Sierra Club or the United Way or what have you and apply those elements to what happens in the world of tipping somebody, whether it's an Uber.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Use science to raise more money. So I've been at that for now close to 25 years, partnering with charities, helping them raise more money, helping them leverage science. And you end up learning some really interesting facts about people. For example,”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you give me the data behind these gut feelings? No, I can't. I said, well, how do you know they're true? And every person said, well, that's just how we always do it. That's how my boss did it. Now, I'm thinking, holy cow, this is two to three percent of the GDP of our nation is charitable giving, right? Two or three percent of wallet is giving of money forget about the time, you know, ad volunteerism to that. And you might get 7% of GDP. So it's a very important sector. But when I learned that it's mostly built on anecdotes, I said, man, we're in business because now I can use this as a research agenda to explore generosity. And I can help charities.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What works and why, but then you can get it right the next time. So I did this fundraiser. And what I first learned was I talked to dozens of fundraising gurus, practitioners, strategists, etc., etc., etc. And they all had rules of thumb. They all said things like use a three to one match rather than a one-to-one match because a three-to-one match will raise more money. When I say three to one, I mean for every hundred dollars somebody gives, the charity matches it with $300. That's a three to one match versus a one-to-one. All these great anecdotes. And each time I would ask them,”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One condition is I want to run the fundraiser is a field experiment. Because I want to learn about why people give what keeps them committed to the cause. And two, I need some upfront money. And that's what I kind of learned in those two days is I went out and talked to a bunch of fundraising specialists and they told me the key is to have upfront money. So the dean gave me $5,000. Big whoop, right? Importantly, he gave me a big list of potential donors who I could ask to give money to the Center for Environmental Policy Analysis. Okay, now I'm in business. My research agenda has always been to use the world as my lab. And if you're ever trying to accomplish something, do it scientifically so you can not only figure out”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody gives a damn about you. You know, you're just trying to do the best you can. So I'm sitting in Orlando, Florida, in my office minding my own business. And I hear a knock on the door. I open my office door and there's the dean of the College of Business standing in my doorway So I say, Dean, his name was Thomas Keon. Dean Tom, how can I help you? He says, John. I want to start a center for environmental policy analysis, and I want you to help me start that center. And your first job is going to be to raise money. So I'm thinking, well, what? I've never raised any money before. I'm a truck driver's son. What's going on here? He said, think about it and come back to me. So I thought about it for a few days and I went to the dean's office and I told him, this is a great opportunity and I will do it. If you satisfy two conditions,”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perfect. I would love that. Is that perfect? Okay. So my research agenda. Actually, started back in the late 90s. And a lot of people ask me, Why did you get involved in working on the science of charitable giving? And a lot of times they assume it's because of my altruism. And I tell them that's not the case. What happened was I was an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida in 1998. An assistant professor means you're the lowest on the poll.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in that example, all of our metrics were outputs. So the output in China was the number of non-defective Items that came off the manufacturing belt. And each team had a goal. And that goal was if it was met, you got to keep your bonus. If the goal wasn't met, you had to give back your bonus. So in the manufacturing plant, as in many of our experiments that involve workers, we are looking at outputs. Now, when I talk about my kids, I want to incentivize an input, but it's really hard to do that in the workplace.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It makes perfect sense. So, what we did in the Chinese manufacturing plant is we had weekly reward periods. So every Monday morning, they were given the bonus. And then that cleared on Friday afternoon. So our experiment lasted six months where we would move people in and out of clawback incentives. We'd put some people in the standard incentive. The standard incentive, of course, is work all week. And at the end of the week, you get your bonus. And we were always comparing whether the clawback does better than the standard.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the end, there are some, of course, that hate it, but there are enough that love it that on that dimension, it actually turns out to be a doubly good incentive because you not only are better as the owner, but the workers like it more too.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Change, think about your own health. You don't really want to go to the doctor, you don't really want to go to the dentist because it's a cost now. And the benefits are in the future. Think about why people drop out of school, you know, as a 16-year-old, there's a lot of costs now, and the benefits aren't for a long time. Is humans, we do a really bad job at those types of issues. And that's why we have problems like climate change and you don't take care of your health and too many people drop out. What's nice about the clawback is it takes that problem and turns it around because it takes the benefits from the end and brings them to the beginning. So you get the good stuff right away. And that serves as a commitment device for many people. So some people in our experiments will actually pay real money to have the claw back, to get to use the clawback.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incentive that we talk about what we found so far is in terms of the depreciation, it does depreciate a little bit like most behavioral nudges, but not a ton. So on that side, you don't have to keep creating a new mousetrap that the real mousetrap in the first one, the clawback, works reasonably well and it has over time for a long time. The side effect one is also sort of interesting because what you find is that many workers actually like the clawback because they view it as a commitment device. And what I mean by that is, you know, most things in life are you have to exert effort today and you receive benefits in the future. So think about climate.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about Using behavioral nudges, or you think about using behavioral incentives, one very important issue that you always need to recognize and keep in mind is will it keep working over and over and over again? And then secondly, does it have any side effects? So in the case of the clawback, you could imagine that you run it one time and it works. And then when you try it a second and a third time, it depreciates. It really doesn't work that well. Or you could imagine that you hire a bunch of school teachers like I did down in Chicago Heights and give them the clawback. And within three months, they all quit because they hate it. It's just too stressful and it's too burdensome on them. Now, those are two very important considerations for any.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's think about studying. When I think about a clawback at the beginning of the week, I will tell them if you work intensively for an hour each night, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, you can keep this incentive that I will give you on Monday morning. Now that incentive can be a pack of baseball cards for my boys. It could be a pass to the movies for my daughters. But the key is give them the incentive early in the week and then they will perform all week. For example, an hour of study in math every night is something that happens all the time in my household that at the end of the week they end up keeping the incentive because nearly every time they meet the goal.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the classroom, so it's not really fair to give you an incentive based on that kind of output. So my incentives roll from in the classroom to on the baseball field to on the soccer field, but it's all the time it's using input incentives with my kids. Now with my workers, whether it's at Lyft or I used to be the department chair here at the University of Chicago's Econ Department, there I can't really observe inputs, so I have to reward outputs. And in the end, it's the organization is affected by the outputs, not the inputs.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So first of all, you're right that whenever I need a really good control that will fall on the twins. But to be fair, I have enough experiments. I think about using experimentation to incent inputs. For example, when the kids are in third or fourth and fifth grade, I tend not to incentivize outputs because outputs are something that a person has a hard time controlling. But what they can control is the set of inputs. What I mean by inputs is how many books you read or how many hours you spend studying. Those are things that the child or the worker or whomever can control. Things like how well you do on the exam. A lot of exams, for example, are graded on a curve. So you can't control how well other students do.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The results are just remarkable. Whether it's school teachers, whether it's workers in a manufacturing plant, whether it's students, whether it's my own kids just across the board, what happens is if you use the clawback, people work harder and everyone's better off in the end because they're more likely to get the reward and you're happier because they've worked harder. So you're happy to give them the incentive.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two of those kids happen to be twins. So I have the perfect treatment and control group. Now some things like My oldest daughter had a very hard time going potty on the toilet. So, what do I do? I give her an incentive, let's say a doll or something else, and I tell her, if you go potty on the toilet, you get to keep it. If you don't, the doll is going to go and sit in a different room and you're not going to be able to play with the doll. That's the clawback incentive.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They work harder and the kids learn more. Now for my own kids, I've also done the same thing. Any good scientist will use his or her own kids as subjects. I'm no different than that. As you mentioned, I have eight kids.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That psychologists have taught us goes as follows if you own something, you really, really, really are hurt if you have to give it up. So the idea here is give somebody some money that will induce them to work harder. And when they do work harder, everyone's better off because they get to keep the money. And my firm is better off because they work harder. Now, where I've used that, I've used that in Chinese manufacturing plants. I started a pre-K school about 12 years ago. I use that with the teachers. So at the beginning of the year in September, beginning of the school year, some of them get the bonus. And then I tell them, if your kids don't perform at the end of the school year, I will take some of it back. And lo and behold, what happens?”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The clawback incentive is an incentive scheme that actually reverses the way we think about traditional incentives. So in traditional incentives, I'm the chief economist at Lyft. The way I incent my workers there is I have them work really hard all year. And then at the end of the year, they receive a bonus if they do a good job. That's great. Now what the clawback incentive is at the beginning of the year, I give them the incentive, but then I tell them if they don't perform, I will take away the incentive. And the idea behind the clawback is I want to first of all show them the money. And then secondly, I want to invoke loss aversion. Loss aversion is something.”
2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT