Some Economics Research Ideas
I'm going to start a PhD program in economics at BU. I've been kicking around some ideas in my head for research topics.
- Names. I'd like to do some research into people with various names. Names vary a lot in popularity from year to year and decade to decade. For example, Amanda was an extremely popular name for girls in the early 80s, but less popular before and after. I'd be interested to look at the life outcomes for Amandas born while it was rising in popularity and while it was falling. My guess would be that parents who are in the leading portion tend to be better educated and wealthier than those in the trailing portion, but I'm really just guessing.
One reason I'm interested is a psych study I saw in college. Two groups were given identical stories, except the main character had different names in the different versions. For one group, it was an "old" name that was no longer popular, like Harry, while the main character for the other group had a more modern name. Participants in the study were asked how they felt about the main character and they liked him better if he had a more modern name.
It might be possible to slightly improve your child's quality of life by giving him/her a name that is on the rise in popularity. If you met a woman named Amanda who was born in 1970 without knowing her age, I would bet you would naturally assume that she was probably closer to the peak of Amandas, around 1980, than you would otherwise. This would be an extremely easy psych study - I don't know if anyone has done it.
You could also look at all of the various tricks that psych studies use to separate out the impacts of the nature and nurture: children who were named by their birth parents but did not live with them, twins where one had an "old" name and one had a "young" one, etc.
- Poker with 20 big blinds. I don't know if someone has calculated this, or even how computationally difficult it would be, but I would be curious to see an optimal strategy for 20 big blind HU NLHE with the following restrictions: the SB can min raise or fold, then the BB can 3bet all-in or fold, then the SB can call or fold. I recently read the optimal strategies for push/fold preflop HU situations in The Mathematics of Poker, and their description of how to calculate it. I have made some progress in calculating it for the 20 bb scenario I described - I wrote a program to calculate all-in equity of two hold 'em hands. I'm not sure if I'll try to follow through and figure it out.
I guess I should follow up with what happened with mapIncluded.com. Basically I paid a guy to do some work on it, and then I did a bunch more work on it to make it better (and learn some PHP in the process). But I hit a snag caused by craigslist's restrictions on what you can post that meant I could only do a much less snazzy version of what I wanted to do and I decided to drop it. I have no regrets though, I learned a lot and it was a fun hobby for a while.
- Names. I'd like to do some research into people with various names. Names vary a lot in popularity from year to year and decade to decade. For example, Amanda was an extremely popular name for girls in the early 80s, but less popular before and after. I'd be interested to look at the life outcomes for Amandas born while it was rising in popularity and while it was falling. My guess would be that parents who are in the leading portion tend to be better educated and wealthier than those in the trailing portion, but I'm really just guessing.
One reason I'm interested is a psych study I saw in college. Two groups were given identical stories, except the main character had different names in the different versions. For one group, it was an "old" name that was no longer popular, like Harry, while the main character for the other group had a more modern name. Participants in the study were asked how they felt about the main character and they liked him better if he had a more modern name.
It might be possible to slightly improve your child's quality of life by giving him/her a name that is on the rise in popularity. If you met a woman named Amanda who was born in 1970 without knowing her age, I would bet you would naturally assume that she was probably closer to the peak of Amandas, around 1980, than you would otherwise. This would be an extremely easy psych study - I don't know if anyone has done it.
You could also look at all of the various tricks that psych studies use to separate out the impacts of the nature and nurture: children who were named by their birth parents but did not live with them, twins where one had an "old" name and one had a "young" one, etc.
- Poker with 20 big blinds. I don't know if someone has calculated this, or even how computationally difficult it would be, but I would be curious to see an optimal strategy for 20 big blind HU NLHE with the following restrictions: the SB can min raise or fold, then the BB can 3bet all-in or fold, then the SB can call or fold. I recently read the optimal strategies for push/fold preflop HU situations in The Mathematics of Poker, and their description of how to calculate it. I have made some progress in calculating it for the 20 bb scenario I described - I wrote a program to calculate all-in equity of two hold 'em hands. I'm not sure if I'll try to follow through and figure it out.
I guess I should follow up with what happened with mapIncluded.com. Basically I paid a guy to do some work on it, and then I did a bunch more work on it to make it better (and learn some PHP in the process). But I hit a snag caused by craigslist's restrictions on what you can post that meant I could only do a much less snazzy version of what I wanted to do and I decided to drop it. I have no regrets though, I learned a lot and it was a fun hobby for a while.
posted by pokerschwab at 3:31 PM
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