Ryan Kendall, PhD

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Non-Cognitive Skills at the Time of COVID-19: An Experiment with Professional Traders and Students (w/ Marco Angrisani, Marco Cipriani, Antonio Guarino, and Julen Ortiz De Zarate Pina). The Quarterly Journal of Finance. Forthcoming.

Decomposing coordination failure in stag hunt games. Experimental Economics, 25(4): 1109 - 1145. 2022.

The effectiveness of prosocial policies: Gender differences arising from social norms (w/ Antonio Cabrales and Angel Sanchez). PLoS one, 17(12): e0275383. 2022.

Do the rules to select rules matter? An experimental analysis of voting rule selection (w/ Kaisa Herne, Katri K. Sieberg, and Maria Maunula). Munich Social Science Review, New Series, 4: 55-92. 2021.

Sequential competitions with a middle-mover advantage. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 91: 101667. 2021.

Decomposing democracy: A comment on “The Future Viability of the Dutch Democracy: A Model Case”. Munich Social Science Review, New Series, 3: 81-92. 2020.

Stress induces contextual blindness in lotteries and coordination games (w/ Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo). Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. 11: Article 236. 2017.

Aligning democracy: A comment on Bruno S. Frey's "Proposals for a democracy of the future". Homo Oeconomicus 34: 243 - 251. doi: 10.1007/s41412-017-0053-4. 2017.

Crime, Punishment, and Evolution in an Adversarial Game (w/ Michael McBride, Maria R. D'Orsogna, and Martin B. Short). European Journal of Applied Mathematics 27(3): 317-337. 2016.

Criminal Defectors Lead to the Emergence of Cooperation in an Experimental, Adversarial Game (w/ Michael McBride, Maria R. D'Orsogna, and Martin B. Short). PLoS ONE 8(4): e61458. doi: 10.137/journal.pone.0061458. 2013.

Working Papers

Decomposing models of bounded rationality (w/ Daniel Jessie)

Any 2x2 game can be decomposed into three payoff components: strategic, behavioral, and kernel. The strategic component sufficiently determines the prediction for a large class of models focused on bounded rationality, including the most commonly used specifications for the Quantal Response Equilibrium and Cognitive Hierarchy. These models, along with others, exhibit a mathematical invariance to changes in a game's behavioral and kernel components, and this paper's primary hypothesis is that humans do not exhibit this invariance. An experiment consisting of 2x2 games shows that subjects systematically respond to changes in non-strategic information: in particular, the behavioral component.

Trading by Professional Traders: An Experiment (w/ Marco Cipriani, Roberta De Filippis, and Antonio Guarino)

We examine how professional traders behave in two financial market experiments. First, participants trade an asset over multiple periods after receiving private information about its value. Second, participants play the Guessing Game. Finally, subjects play our novel, individual-level version of the Guessing Game and we collect data on cognitive abilities, risk preference, and confidence. We find three differences between traders and students. Traders do not produce price bubbles observed in previous studies. Traders aggregate private information better. Traders show higher levels of strategic sophistication in the Guessing Game. These results are not driven by different individual characteristics (e.g., cognitive abilities).

25 minute presentation

Axios article

Risk preferences at the Time of COVID-19: An Experiment with Professional Traders and Students (w/ Marco Angrisani, Marco Cipriani, Antonio Guarino, and Julen Ortiz De Zarate Pina)

We study whether the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted risk preferences, comparing the results of experiments conducted before and during the outbreak. In each experiment, we elicit risk preferences from two sample groups: professional traders and students. We find that, on average, risk preferences have remained constant for both participant pools. Our results suggest that the increases in risk premia observed during the pandemic are not due to changes in risk appetite, rather, they are solely due to a change in market participants’ beliefs. Our findings support the traditional view that risk preferences are not affected by economic or social circumstances