Colin Sullivan is completing a two-year postdoc at Stanford this year, and is on the job market.
His job market paper is an experiment with an exceptionally creative design. (Spoiler: it involves a cat actually getting a kidney transplant.)
Eliciting Preferences Over Life And Death: Experimental Evidence From Organ Transplantation by Colin by D. Sullivan
Abstract: Optimal allocation of scarce, life-saving medical treatment depends on society’s preferences over survival distributions, governed by notions of equality and efficiency. In a novel experiment, I elicit preferences over survival distributions in incentivized, life-or-death decisions. Subjects allocate an organ transplant among real cats with kidney failure. In each choice, subjects allocate a single organ based on the expected survival of each patient. The survival rates imply a price ratio, allowing me to infer the shape of indifference curves over survival bundles. I find that the vast majority (80%) of subjects respond to increases in total expected survival time, while a small minority display Leontief preferences, providing the transplant to the shortest-lived patient at all price ratios. Hypothetical decisions may not be reliable in this context: a large share (46%) of subjects allocate a hypothetical transplant differently than a real transplant, though estimates of aggregate preferences are the same across incentivized and unincentivized conditions. Finally, I show that aversion to wealth inequality is a good predictor of aversion to survival inequality.
(This human subjects research proto-col was approved by the Stanford University Institutional Review Board (IRB). A discussion of ethical considerations in designing this protocol is included in Appendix A.)
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It's not his first really very creative experimental design: check out is 2019 paper in the AER:
American Economic Review, 2019, Vol. 109 (11): 3713-44. Online Appendix
Abstract: We introduce a new experimental paradigm to evaluate employer preferences, called Incentivized Resume Rating (IRR). Employers evaluate resumes they know to be hypothetical in order to be matched with real job seekers, preserving incentives while avoiding the deception necessary in audit studies. We deploy IRR with employers recruiting college seniors from a prestigious school, randomizing human capital characteristics and demographics of hypothetical candidates. We measure both employer preferences for candidates and employer beliefs about the likelihood candidates will accept job offers, avoiding a typical confound in audit studies. We discuss the costs, benefits, and future applications of this new methodology.
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My advice if you're hiring: check him out.
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