Whitebox Advisors Graduate Student Conference 2019

The Annual Whitebox Advisors Graduate Student Conference draws top doctoral students from around the world to present their research in the fields of Behavioral Economics, Behavioral Finance and Behavioral Marketing.  The goal of the conference is to foster an environment to promote interaction amongst doctoral student researchers, and to provide feedback for students presenting their work in these fields.

The research efforts in these fields have been helped immeasurably by the generous support of Andrew Redleaf of Whitebox Advisors.

Register to attend the conference on Thursday, May 9, 2019.

Speakers

• Elizabeth Friedman

  Yale University
  CONFERENCE ORGANIZER
  

  Liz Friedman is a sixth year behavioral marketing PhD student at Yale SOM. Her research focuses primarily on consumer decision making. She explores how subtle changes to the choice context and the consumer's active goals affect comparisons and decisions. Prior to joining Yale, Liz worked as a management consultant for Monitor Group and the New England Consulting Group. She will join Columbia Business School as an Assistant Professor of Marketing this summer.

• Avner Langut

  Yale University
  CONFERENCE ORGANIZER
  

  Avner Langut is a 6th year doctoral candidate at Yale University School of Business Department of Finance. His research interests lie at the intersection of behavioral finance, intermediary finance and mutual fund research. His current work investigates the effect of leverage induced friction on mutual fund behavior.

• Ben Matthies

  Yale University
  CONFERENCE ORGANIZER
  

  Ben Matthies is a Ph.D. Candidate in Financial Economics at Yale University. His research focuses on Asset Pricing and Behavioral Finance.

• Chen Wang

  Yale University
  CONFERENCE ORGANIZER
  

  Chen Wang is a Ph.D. Candidate in Financial Economics at Yale School of Management. His research interests lie at the intersection of behavioral finance and asset pricing. Please check out his website (https://chenwang.one/) to find out more about his work.

• Brad Cannon

  Ohio State University
  Presenter
  

  I am a fourth-year Finance PhD student at The Ohio State University. My research interests include behavioral finance and asset pricing. I received an M.S. in Financial Economics and a B.S. in Finance and Economics from Utah State University.

• Alexia Delfino

  London School of Economics
  Presenter
  

  Alexia Delfino is a 5th year doctoral candidate in Economics at the London School of Economics. Her research interests lie at the intersection of labour, development and behavioral economics. Her current work in developed countries investigates topics related to employees' selection and motivations in organizations. For instance, her job market paper explores the supply-side determinants of occupational gender segregation through a nationwide field recruitment experiment in the UK. In developing countries, her research focuses on small scale entrepreneurship and how different aspects of social identity may become barriers to growth.

• Kristin Donnelly

  UC Berkeley
  Presenter
  

  Kristin Donnelly is a PhD student in Marketing at UC Berkeley. Kristin explores a wide range of topics within judgment and decision-making. For example, her previous studies have addressed such questions as whether publishing in low impact journals helps or hurts a job candidate, whether a suspect's position in a criminal lineup affects the likelihood that they will be identified, how the orientation of a cup affects judgments of its volume, and how the orientation of a face affects perceptions of its attractiveness. Kristin's recent work focuses on number cognition and time perception, particularly as they relate to consumer behavior.

• Xiao Li

  University of Arizona
  Presenter
  

  Xiao Li is a PhD in finance candidate at the University of Arizona. His research interests include asset allocation, anomaly, behavioral finance, and machine learning. To know more about him, please click on the link: https://www.lixiao1021.com/ to visit his website.

• Xiaomin Li

  Caltech
  Presenter
  

  Xiaomin Li received her BS in Finance from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in 2013. She received her MA in Economics from New York University in 2015 and her advisor was Adam Brandenburger. Xiaomin is currently a Behavioral Social Neuroscience PhD Candidate at Caltech and her advisor is Colin Camerer.

• Francesco Nicolai

  London School of Economics
  Presenter
  

  Francesco Nicolai is a fourth year Ph.D. student in Finance at the London School of Economics. Francesco is interested in how behavioral biases affect portfolio choices both from an Asset Pricing and Public Finance point of view. Francesco is also interested in how limits to arbitrage affect asset markets. Before joining LSE, Francesco obtained a M.Sc. in economics at Bocconi University in Milan.

• Yu Wang

  Boston College
  Presenter
  

  Yu Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at Boston College. Her research interests include asset pricing, behavioral finance, and corporate finance.

• Franz Ostrizek

  Princeton University
  Presenter
  

  Franz Ostrizek is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in economics at Princeton University. His research projects focus on the long-run consequences of behavioral biases. In one line of research, he examines how firms deal with their workers' overconfidence by changing the way incentive contracts are structured. Another line of research investigates the conditions under which non-transparent and exploitative business practices persist in markets. Before coming to Princeton, Franz earned an M.Sc. in economics at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, and a Mag. in law at the University of Vienna.

• Justin Pomerance

  University of Colorado, Boulder
  Presenter
  

  Justin Pomerance is a fourth year PhD candidate in marketing at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics from Middlebury College in Vermont, receiving highest honors from the department. He worked in consulting in Manhattan prior to moving to Boulder. He is broadly interested in financial self-regulation, the process by which consumers adjust their financial decision making given changes in their financial state. His research investigates why people experience the pain of paying (a negative affective reaction to spending money), and why people hold positively biased views of their progress toward financial goals. While Justin uses predominately laboratory-based studies, he is broadly interested in diverse methods including analysis of secondary data, conjoint analysis, natural experiments, and field experiments, and he attempts to incorporate mixed methods into his research whenever possible.

• Fuad Shennib

  Stanford University
  Presenter
  

  Fuad Shennib is a second-year Behavioral Marketing PhD student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He currently studies how different elicitation methods influence preferences along with factors that underlie prosocial versus economically-rational behaviors. He conducts his research through online, lab, and field experiments.

• Anirudh Tiwathia

  University of Chicago
  Presenter
  

  I am Ph.D student at the Center for Decision Research at the Booth School of Business in the final year of a dual-doctoral program in Business (focus: Behavioral Policy & Interventions) and Psychology (Cognitive Psychology). Prior to joining the CDR, I completed a M.A. in Social Science (Decision Science) and M.A. in Public Policy, which laid the groundwork for my primary focus on Behavioral Public Policy. Prior to pursing my doctoral studies, I worked for 3 years at the U.N. in the New York - split evenly between UNICEF and the UNDP, as well as a brief stint at the Analyst Institute. My primary research aims are: (a) to extend and apply behavioral findings in field settings to facilitate the pursuit of public policy objectives; (b) to examine the cognitive processes underlying choice, judgment, and decision-making, with a current focus on the determinants and consequences of perceived corruption / legitimacy in democratic institutions. I also have a parallel interest in examining the use of statistical learning in the empirical sciences to support both improvements in prediction and causal inference; I am motivated by the belief that psychologically-grounded theories of behavior and social phenomena can significantly improve both policy formulation and its implementation. Equally, I believe engagement with the economic and policy domains can generate profitable lines of inquiry for the study of psychological phenomena in and of themselves. Methodologically, I am particularly excited by opportunities for triangulation when tackling an empirical problem - ideally, gathering corroborating evidence from field studies, controlled lab studies, and the analysis of open data-sets.

• Guy Voicheck

  Yale University
  Presenter
  

  Guy Voichek is a doctoral student in Behavioral Marketing at Yale. His research interests include affective predictions, experiences and wellbeing, and behavioral law.

Additional Information

• AGENDA

  Thursday, May 9, 2019
  Yale School of Management Classroom 4210
  165 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT
   

  Time:              Details:

  8:30am	Registration & Breakfast Outside Classroom 4210
  	Session 1: Behavioral Finance
  9:00am	“Revealed Expectations and Learning Biases: Evidence from the Mutual Fund Industry” Francesco Nicolai, London School of Economics
  9:30am	“Does Mispricing Have Real Effects On Neighboring Firms” Brad Cannon, Ohio State University
  10:00am	“Market Response to Macroeconomic News under Limited Attention: Theory and Evidence” Yu Wang, Boston College
  10:30am	Break
  	Session 2: Behavioral Marketing
  11:00am	“The Unpredictable Positive Effects of Sports Gambling: Affective Forecasting Errors in Wagering” Guy Voichek, Yale University
  11:30pm	“Beyond Paper or Plastic: Mental Representations of Financial Resources Influence Pain of Payment” Justin Pomerance, University of Colorado, Boulder
  12:00pm	“Preference Reversals Between Digital and Physical Goods” Fuad Shennib, Stanford University
  12:30pm	Lunch Buffet Outside Classroom 4210
  1:30pm	“Time Periods Feel Longer When They Span More Boundaries” Kristin Donnelly, University of California, Berkeley
  	Behavioral Finance
  2:00pm	“Does Too Much Arbitrage Destabilize Stock Price? Evidence from Short Selling and Post Earnings Announcement Drift” Xiao Li, University of Arizona
  	Session 3: Behavioral Economics
  2:30pm	“(Biased) Perceptions of Corruption and Their Consequences for Cheating and Unethical Behavior” Anirudh Tiwathia, University of Chicago
  3:00pm	Break
  3:30pm	“Identity, Information and the Choice of Occupation: Experimental Evidence on Men in Pink-Collar Jobs” Alexia Delfino, London School of Economics
  4:00pm	“Long-Run Incentives for Overconfident Workers” Franz Ostrizek, Princeton University
  4:30pm	“Using Visual Salience in Empirical Game Theory” Xiaomin Li, Caltech
  5:00pm	Conference Adjourns

  Questions?  Contact: whiteboxdoctoral@yale.edu