Anna Dreber Almenberg, part of Replication Markets’ experiment design team, is the Johan Björkman Professor of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics.
She took time recently to answer a few questions about her interest in the field of research replication.
What got you thinking about replications and markets?
For me it all started when my husband Johan Almenberg and our dear friend and collaborator Thomas Pfeiffer 10+ years ago talked about studies for which the results just seemed a little bit too good. Around the same time we also read Robin Hanson’s “Could gambling save science”, which lead to many new thoughts.
But it’s been a continuous process, with some results of my own not being replicable (my early work on candidate genes and economic risk taking – we basically had no statistical power so a p-value less than 0.05 is pretty meaningless!), and our failed attempt to replicate the key findings of power posing (where we wanted to replicate the original study in order to extend it to other domains).
What is most exciting about this work?
That you have to update your beliefs quite a lot!
Any great "Aha!" moments?
Often! I guess that tells you something about my priors…
What other roles do you see for markets in science?
We should consider them in more instances – as additions rather than substitutes perhaps to e.g. peer review, etc.
What do you do when you’re not being an economist?
Not sure I’m always an economist when working… lots of the work is in interdisciplinary teams on interdisciplinary questions. But when not working I’m with the family or reading books.
