Dreber Almenberg, Anna
I'm the Johan Björkman professor of economics at the Department of Economics, mainly doing meta-science and behavioral and experimental economics.
I am an Editor at the and an Associate Editor at the .
I am a , a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (), and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (. I am also affiliated with the Department of Economics at the University of Innsbruck and the .
I am mainly interested in meta-science, where the focus is on the credibility or reliability of scientific results. We perform replications – typically meaning that experimental studies are redone using the same methods as in the original papers but on new and larger samples – and we also set up prediction markets and forecasting surveys to see whether researchers can predict replication outcomes as well as the outcomes of new hypothesis tests. We have done replications in experimental economics (), for social science experiments published in Nature and Science (), and we were also part of the big replication project in psychology (). These papers also include prediction markets, and our first paper on that topic is . is a summary of much of this in Swedish. In these projects we typically find that a substantial share of results does not replicate, and there is something systematic about which results replicate that the prediction markets can pick up.
We are also doing multi-analyst studies where we ask many researchers to test the same hypotheses on the same data. The results typically suggest a lot of variation in results for a given hypothesis – see for neuroscience and for finance.
If you are interested in reproducing or replicating studies, see the where there are many such possibilities!
I am also interested in variation in economic preferences between and within individuals. In older projects we for example looked at variation in gender differences in preferences in different countries and samples, see e.g. where we do similar experiments in Colombia and Sweden. In other projects we try to understand why women typically ask for less in wage negotiations (). We also study whether there are hormonal causes for individual variation in preferences and do large hormone administration projects. In we administer the contraceptive pill or placebo to 340 women for a period of 3 months and find no effects of the pill vs placebo on economic decision making (altruism, risk taking and willingness to compete). We also find no menstrual cycle effects. We also do not find that a putative marker of prenatal testosterone exposure can predict economic preferences (see ).
I teach Gender Economics at the MSc level and sometime supervise MSc theses in economics. I also give guest lectures in many courses, typically with a meta science focus.
