The Dynamics of Inattention in the (Baseball) Field

Archsmith, James; Heyes, Anthony; Neidell, Matthew; Sampat, Bhaven N.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3865465

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Relatedly, a recent study of baseball umpires showed that umpires tire of making decisions about strikes and balls over the course of a game, depleting their budget of attention and leading to errors as the game progresses. 43 These dynamics effect elites and members of the mass public when they are trying to act under pressure. When offering advice, experts seldom offer only one path forward.…”

Section: An Oversupply Of Advicementioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming expert on experts

Ginsberg¹,

Paschall²

2022

Speaking Truth to Power

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Decision-makers frequently find themselves required to make judgments that seem to depend upon specialized scientific, mathematical, or technical knowledge. When this happens, they often turn to experts -individuals with formal training, experience, achievements, and peer recognition in the field in question. Experts, in turn, often appeal to those in positions of power to support their ongoing work, framing it as an investment in information that can guide future decisions. In this way, it might appear that experts and decision-makers have a symbiotic relationship. Decision-makers want or need expert advice, and experts stand to benefit from offering such advice.Today, indeed, the buying and selling of expertise is a highly organized enterprise. Decision-makers often solicit expert advice by turning to a specific expert or by publishing requests for proposals to the relevant community of experts. Bureaucratic agencies establish advisory committees of experts to help them make decisions. Not waiting to be asked, experts, for their part, often market their services directly to potential clients. Universities, think tanks, and consulting firms vie among themselves to secure some of the billions of dollars in grants and contracts offered by government agencies and private firms seeking expert advice, technical support, or the benefits of research and development. Experts working for universities frequently submit grant proposals to government agencies and private entities suggesting valuable research they might conduct in exchange for financial support. In the United States, for example, government agencies including the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health, among others, support billions of dollars in scientific and technical research every year.The partnership between decision-makers and experts, however, is not always a happy one. In the political realm, at least, the history of this relationship often has been fraught with mistrust and hostility. Decision-makers have rejected the advice of experts since time immemorial. In the Hebrew bible, the Book of Kings relates the story of Rehoboam, successor to Solomon. Rehoboam rejected the counsel of his father's experienced advisors and followed his own judgment. The result was a rebellion and the secession of the northern segment of the Israelite kingdom. More recently, experts have sounded the alarm on innumerable crises of the modern era, but all too often are frustrated by the sclerotic response of the government. And, of course, experts themselves are hardly perfect. To cite a recent example, as America's

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Section: An Oversupply Of Advicementioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming expert on experts

Ginsberg¹,

Paschall²

2022

Speaking Truth to Power

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“…Specifically, I link the ENEM records to a census of all Brazilian college students and an employee-employer matched dataset that covers the universe of formal-sector workers in Brazil. Linder et al, 2014;Kim et al, 2018); financial analysts make less accurate forecasts (Hirshleifer et al, 2019); and umpires make more incorrect calls in baseball games (Archsmith et al, 2021). 4 For example, in the US, 65% of adults drink coffee daily (Lampkin, 2012), and about 20% of college students report using nootropics without a prescription to enhance focus and cognition (Benson et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Endurance, Talent Selection, and the Labor Market Returns to Human Capital

Reyes¹

2023

Preprint

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Cognitive endurance-the ability to sustain performance on a cognitively-demanding task over time-is thought to be a crucial productivity determinant. However, a lack of data on this variable has limited researchers' ability to understand its role for success in college and the labor market. This paper uses college-admission-exam records from 15 million Brazilian high school students to measure cognitive endurance based on changes in performance throughout the exam. By exploiting exogenous variation in the order of exam questions, I show that students are 7.1 percentage points more likely to correctly answer a given question when it appears at the beginning of the day versus the end (relative to a sample mean of 34.3%). I develop a method to decompose test scores into fatigue-adjusted ability and cognitive endurance. I then merge these measures into a higher-education census and the earnings records of the universe of Brazilian formal-sector workers to quantify the association between endurance and long-run outcomes. I find that cognitive endurance has a statistically and economically significant wage return. Controlling for fatigue-adjusted ability and other student characteristics, a one-standard-deviation higher endurance predicts a 5.4% wage increase. This wage return to endurance is sizable, equivalent to a third of the wage return to ability. I also document positive associations between endurance and college attendance, college quality, college graduation, firm quality, and other outcomes. Finally, I show how systematic differences in endurance across students interact with the exam design to determine the sorting of students to colleges. I discuss the implications of these findings for the use of cognitive assessments for talent selection and investments in interventions that build cognitive endurance.

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The Dynamics of Inattention in the (Baseball) Field

Cited by 2 publications

References 24 publications

Becoming expert on experts

Becoming expert on experts

Cognitive Endurance, Talent Selection, and the Labor Market Returns to Human Capital

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