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Research
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Teaching
***Now why are you looking at my html code?***

Working Papers | Software

Work in Progress

  • “Are the Choices of Children and Seniors Consistent under Uncertainty?”
      with Mike Urbancic - pilot experiment completed
  • “Mental Accounting among Seniors” - pilot experiment completed
  • “Uncertainty in Hong Kong's University Admission” with Yinghua He
  • “Accuracy of Prediction:
      Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment” with Dan Acland

Working Papers | Software

  • BlokSet is a software providing several ways of limiting how much time one can spend on MMORPG's, or any software in general. It is developed for Chapter 2 of my doctoral thesis. It is best viewed as a proof of concept rather than a full-fledged product.

    This version does not contain the monitoring software used in the aforementioned study.

Currently Teaching:
CUHK ECON 1010/UGEC 1511
CUHK ECON 2011
CUHK ECON 4901

Past Course Descriptions:
Descriptions with Evaluations

Past Course Materials:
UCB ECON 138 Summer 2010
UCB ECON 100A Spring 2008

The amount of time youth spend on game-playing is significant, with a recent representative survey pinning the number at 0.84 hours per day. To investigate the extent to which gameplaying can be attributed to self-control problems, I implemented a field experiment on a type of widely played multiplayer online games. I monitored the amount of time 105 undergraduates spent playing online games for a period of 3.5 months. Students assigned to the treatment group were additionally given software that they could use to limit their duration of play.

I found that the demand for commitment appears limited—while 79 percent of the treatment subjects used the software voluntarily in the first four weeks, the fraction eventually dropped to around 5 percent. At the end of the experiment, 10.4 percent of treatment subjects had a positive willingness-to-pay for the software. There is suggestive evidence that usage of the commitment device reduces duration of play but not frequency of play—subjects in the treatment group played an estimated 66.4 percent less than those in the control group, as measured by total hours played. The difference is driven by a reduction among heavy players, and persists even after most subjects stopped using the devices. Lastly, I find that players on average overestimated how long they would play.

This project investigates the effect of uncertainty on students' application behaviour. Taking the change in the public examination system as a natural experiment, we examine how the two graduating high school cohorts in academic year 2011-2012 approach their JUPAS applications. The lack of past admission statistics implies that the new cohort face higher uncertainty, and as a result they might become more conservative in choosing which programs to apply. We would also like to see if providing parents and students with more information changes the application strategy of the new cohort.

We examine the utilization of commitment devices on an online word game that has few substitutes. The experimental environment allows us to accurately measure time spent on the game based on the activities of over 55,000 players. We find that 12-35 percent of subjects provided with a commitment device manifested a demand for it, depending on what threshold one uses to categorize a subject as having a demand. The availability of commitment device reduces the number of long sessions while increasing that of short sessions. Lastly, players with commitment devices stay longer with the game.

Using a popular online word game, we examine the utilization of commitment devices and accuracy of players' predictions about how much they would play in the future. This is important because the literature often assumes that incentivizing is necessary and sufficient to garner accurate responses, but there has little empirical study of whether this is the case. We use an online word game that has few substitutes.

We investigate the relationship between school children and seniors' consistency of choices under risk and their age and socio-demographic background. Consistency of choices, as measured by adherence to the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference (GARP), is a fundamental property of rationality in economic theory. The degree to which consistency varies with age thus has important implications for theories of mental development and the study of aging. This study measures adherence to GARP by asking subjects to make a series of trade-offs between different amounts of possible compensation, corresponding to different random outcomes.

I study how seniors account for their daily expenses by comparing their self-reported expenditure with records of their electronic transactions.