Institute for Economic and Social Research

Seminar |Shuo Liu, Peking University

2020-09-22

Title:Sad Scales and Happy Times: Eliciting Cardinal Information from Ordered Response Data

Speaker:Shuo Liu, Peking University

Time:September 28th 2020,13:30-15:00

Venue:Zengxianzi Building 406


About the speaker:

Shuoliu, Assistant Professor at Department of Applied Economics, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University.

Abstract:

Surveys have become an important tool in economics and in social science more broadly. However, it is well known that common methods (e.g., ordered probit) used to analyze ordinal survey data require strong, and often unjustified distributional assumptions. In this paper, we propose using observable survey response times to solve that problem. Our main identifying assumption is that individual response time is decreasing in the distance between the value of the latent variable and an indecision threshold. We provide conditions under which the expected values of the latent variables can be compared across groups, even without making any distributional assumptions. We show how our method can be implemented in practice and give rise to new insights by applying it to an online survey experiment.

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Copyright © 2019 Institute for Economic and Social Research ICP record No.: Yue ICP Bei No. 12087612