Daniela Valdivia
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Economics at Indiana University. My research interests are in experimental and behavioral economics, as well as mechanism design. My current research focuses on belief and choice elicitation in online surveys.
Download my CV here.
Email me at: davaldiv@iu.edu
(Draft Coming Soon)
Survey data is a key source of information for the social sciences and allows us to learn about subjects’ unverifiable preferences and habits. However, its reliability can be questioned since respondents often treat hypothetical choices differently from real, binding choices. We test a novel mechanism for eliciting unverifiable information, the choice matching mechanism, in a verifiable environment, and collect information that allows us to assess the validity of a critical assumption in most choice elicitation mechanisms based on scoring rules, impersonal updating. The results are puzzling; choice matching fails to eliminate hypothetical bias, although we find evidence in favor of the impersonal updating assumption. A key insight is that not only the choices differ in hypothetical vs binding environments, but so do the subjective beliefs about the distribution of choices.
(Draft Coming Soon, Available Upon Request)
This paper examines how the order in which decisions are made impacts outcomes in coordination settings. Theoretically, we highlight that outcomes become more predictable and efficient when decisions are made sequentially rather than simultaneously. Experimental evidence supports this prediction, showing the sequential move framework is less sensitive to increases in strategic uncertainty. Additional dynamic measures reveal that the lack of resilience to setbacks is driving coordination failures in the simultaneous environment. Importantly, we find that the sequential structure alters the allocation of strategic uncertainty in a group, shifting most of it to the first-mover.
ECON-M 500, Mathematics for Economists (Sample Syllabus)
Instructor of record for 2 sessions
ECON-E 370, Statistical Analysis for Business and Economics (Sample Syllabus)
Instructor of record for 2 sessions and teaching assistant for 1 session
ECON-B 251, Fundamentals of Economics for Business II
Instructor of record for 3 sessions and teaching assistant for 1 session
ECON-B 251 Fundamentals of Economics for Business I
Teaching assistant for 2 sessions
COLL-C 104 Gender Economics
Teaching assistant for 1 session
XE-0156, Fundamentals of Economics (Sample Syllabus in Spanish)
Instructor of record for 3 sessions