NAME FOR THAT
ITEM: Research suggests you’ll come out ahead if you fill a jar with coins and auction it off.
STUDY: “I Won the Auction but Don’t Want the Prize,” Journal of Conflct Resolution, December 1983
AUTHOR: Max Bazerman, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
OUTSIDE FUNDING: National Science Foundation, Boston University School of Management
ITEM: Economists observed the winner’s curse in eBay auctions.
STUDY: “The Winner’s Curse, Reserve Prices, and Endogenous Entry: Empirical Insights From eBay Auctions,” RAND Journal of Economics, 2003
AUTHOR: Patrick Bajari, Department of Economics, Stanford University
OUTSIDE FUNDING: Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, National Science Foundation, Hoover Institution’s W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellows program
QUICK STUDIES
ITEM: Financial hardship and obesity do not have a causal relationship.
STUDY: “Financial Hardship and Obesity,” Economics and Human Biology, 2014
AUTHOR: Susan Averett, Department of Economics, Lafayette College
OUTSIDE FUNDING: The research uses data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Population Center, which is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and 17 other agencies.
ITEM: Shopping with friends strengthens attachments to malls.
STUDY: “Why Shopping Pals Make malls Different,” Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2014
AUTHOR: Jean-Charles Chebat, HEC Montreal
OUTSIDE FUNDING: Ivanhoe Cambridge, a Montreal-based corporation which owns several malls in North America
GAME THEORIES
ITEM: Assume your fellow contestants will be foolish and plan accordingly.
STUDY: “The Price Is Right, but Are the Bids? An Investigation of Rational Decision Theory,” American Economic Review, September 1996
AUTHOR: Jonathan Berk, School of Business Administration, University of Washington
OUTSIDE FUNDING: Richard D. Irwin Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
“IF I SUSPEND THEM, I CAN’T TEACH THEM”
ITEM: Texas students who were suspended once were nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the justice system.
STUDY: “Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study on How School Discipline Relates to Students’ Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement,” July 2011
AUTHOR: Tony Fabelo, Director, Council of State Governments Justice Center
OUTSIDE FUNDING: Atlantic Philanthropies, Open Society Foundations
ITEM: Students suspended even once from ninth grade were twice as likely to drop out.
STUDY: “Sent Home and Put Off-Track: The Antecedents, Disproportionalities, and Consequences of Being Suspended in the Ninth Grade,” December 2012
AUTHOR: Robert Balfanz, Everyone Graduates Center, Johns Hopkins University
OUTSIDE FUNDING: Published by The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at the University of California-Los Angeles, which produces research that is often cited in Supreme Court cases related to racial and ethnic equity. The Project is funded by several dozen philanthropies including the Ford Foundation and the Arca Foundation.
ITEM: Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports tactics have reduced office discipline referrals by 33 percent in 37 schools nationwide.
STUDY: “Effects of School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports on Child Behavior Problems,” Pediatrics, October 2012
AUTHOR: Catherine Bradshaw, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University
OUTSIDE FUNDING: National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute of Mental Health, United States Department of Education
THE TIPPING POINT
ITEM: Only about 13 percent of Americans say they tip to influence future service.
STUDY: “Tipping Motivations and Behavior in the U.S. and Israel,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2010
AUTHOR: Ofer Azar, Department of Business Administration, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
OUTSIDE FUNDING: The Phillipe Monaster Center for Economic Research
THE REFORMATION
ITEM: When presented with a list of words to rearrange, subjects thought about aging and walked more slowly when the list included words like “bingo” or “Florida”.
STUDY: “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effeccts of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action,” Journal of Positive Psychology, 1996
AUTHOR: John Bargh, Department of Psychology, New York University
OUTSIDE FUNDING: National Science Foundation, Germany’s Max Planck Society Research Prize
BATTLEFIELD EARTH
ITEM: Volcanic eruptions in the northern hemisphere strongly correlated with droughts in the Sahel region of Africa.
STUDY: “Asymmetric Forcing From Stratospheric Aerosols Impacts Sahelian Rainfall,” Nature Climate Change, March 2013
AUTHOR: Jim Haywood, Department of Mathematics, University of Exeter
OUTSIDE FUNDING: Conducted with the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s National Weather Service, and supported by three British projects related to climate change and geoengineering: a collaborative effort between universities and the defense firm Marshall Aerospace called the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) program, the Integrated Assessment of Geoengineering Projects program, and the Met Office’s Hadley Center, which conducts climate change research.
A DOZEN WORDS FOR MISUNDERSTOOD
ITEM: If you show a Russian the two shades of blue, his speed at differentiating them is just 124 milliseconds faster than an English speaker’s.
STUDY: “Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2007
AUTHOR: Jonathan Winawer, Department of Psychology, New York University
OUTSIDE FUNDING: National Science Foundation
ITEM: Evidential markers don’t correlate with broader cultural traits; Korean children are no better at attributing things than English-speaking children with no evidential markers.
STUDY: “Evidentiality in Language and Cognition,” Cognition, May 2007
AUTHOR: Anna Papafragou, University of Delaware
OUTSIDE FUNDING: National Institutes of Health’s Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada
This post originally appeared in the May/June 2014 issue ofPacific Standardas “Who Funded That?” For more, subscribe to our print magazine.
