Muriel Niederle

Associate Professor (with tenure) in Economics
Stanford University

This is my new Experimental Economics and Market Design page (in progress…;)

My Papers only

Experimental Ec. 179
Experimental Ec. and

Address: Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6072.
Phone: (650) 723-7359, Fax: (650) 725-5702, email: niederle at stanford.edu.

Here’s a picture of how I look in a suit….

For Students on the Job Market, see below.

Papers

The first strand of literature I am working on can be broadly thought of as market design. While that includes studying markets that have been designed (such as the National Residency Matching Market), I am also interested in the evolution of rules and market institutions, and the role of institutions in market outcomes. My matching papers are 2 (see also the controversy and our reply on 2a), 3, 4, 8 and 9. Some of my papers on matching are still working papers: I and II.

I am also an experimental economist. In matching I use experiments mostly to complement field data, as in my paper 8 and working papers II. I also use experiments to understand more about the gender gap in earnings, the glass ceiling effect and discrimination: published papers 1, and some work in progress, hopefully to be posted soon.

I also have experiments on bargaining (Published paper 6), on markets (published paper 7) and in the use of experiments on teaching (published paper 5).

PUBLISHED PAPERS

1. Gneezy, Uri, Muriel Niederle, Aldo Rustichini, “Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXVIII, August 2003, 1049 – 1074.

2. Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth, “Relationship Between Wages and Presence of a Match in Medical Fellowships”, JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 290, No. 9, September 3, 2003, 1153-1154.

2. a. Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth, “Effect of a Match on Salaries for Medical Fellows—Reply,” JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 290, No. 18, November 12, 2003, 2408.

3. Niederle, Muriel and Alvin E. Roth, “Unraveling reduces mobility in a labor market: Gastroenterology with and without a centralized match”, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 111, No. 6, December 2003, 1342 – 1352.

4. Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth, “The Gastroenterology Fellowship Match: How it failed, and why it could succeed once again”, Gastroenterology, 127, August 2004, 658-666.

4. a. Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth, “Re-starting the Gastroenterology Match,” letter The American Journal of Gastroenterology, 100 (5), 1202-1203.

5. Asker, John, Brit Grosskopf, C. Nicholas McKinney, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth and Georg Weizsäcker, “Teaching auction strategy using experiments administered via the Internet”, Journal of Economic Education, vol. 35, No. 4, Fall 2004, 330 – 342.

6. Bereby-Meyer, Yoella, and Muriel Niederle, “Fairness in Bargaining,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 56, No. 2, February 2005, 173-186.

7. Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth, “The Gastroenterology Fellowship Market: Should there be a Match?” American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, vol. 95, No.2, May 2005

8. McKinney, C. Nicholas, Muriel Niederle, and Alvin E. Roth, “The collapse of a medical labor clearinghouse (and why such failures are rare),” American Economic Review, vol. 95, No.3, June 2005, 878-889.

9. Kirchsteiger, Georg, Muriel Niederle, and Jan Potters, “Endogenizing Market Institutions: An Experimental Approach”, European Economic Review, vol. 49, No. 7, October 2005, 1827-1853.

10. Niederle, Muriel, Deborah D. Proctor and Alvin E. Roth, “What will be needed for the new GI fellowship match to succeed?”, Gastroenterology, 130, January 2006, 218-224.

11. Niederle, Muriel, and Lise Vesterlund, “Do Women Shy away from Competition? Do Men Compete too Much?,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2007, Vol. 122, No. 3: 1067-1101.

12. Niederle, Muriel, “Competitive Wages in a Match with Ordered Contracts”, American Economic Review, vol. 97, No.5, December 2007, 1957 - 1969.

13. Harner Christopher D., Anil S. Ranawat, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, Peter J. Stern, Shepard R. Hurwitz, William Levine, G. Paul DeRosa, Serena S. Hu, “Current State of Fellowship Hiring: Is a universal match necessary? Is it possible?”, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, June 2008; 90: 1375-1384.

14. Niederle, Muriel, Alvin E. Roth and Tayfun Sonmez, “Matching”, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2^nd edition, Eds. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

15. Niederle, Muriel, Deborah D. Proctor and Alvin E. Roth, “The Gastroenterology Fellowship Match – The First Two Years”, Gastroenterology, 135, August 2008, 344-346.

16. Niederle, Muriel and Lise Vesterlund, “Gender Differences in Competition”, Negotiation Journal, October 2008, vol 24, No.4, 447-465.

17. Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth, “Market Culture: How Rules Governing Exploding Offers Affect Market Performance,” American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2009, 2,1, 199-219. Technical appendix.

18. Niederle, Muriel and Alvin E. Roth, “The Effects of a Central Clearinghouse on Job placement, Wages, and Hiring Practices”, forthcoming in Labor Market Intermediation, David Autor, Editor, The University of Chicago Press.

19. Niederle, Muriel and Lise Vesterlund, “Explaining the Gender Gap in Math Test Scores: The Role of Competition,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010, Vol 24, Number 2, 129-144.

20. Ivanov, Asen, Dan Levin and Muriel Niederle, “Can Relaxation of Beliefs Rationalize the Winner’s Curse? An Experimental Study”, Econometrica, July 2010, Vol. 78, No 4, 1435-1452. Supplementary Material.

21. Peter Coles, John Cawley, Phillip B. Levine, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, and John J. Siegfried, “The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective,” forthcoming, Journal of Economic Perspectives.

22. Niederle, Muriel, “Intelligent Design: The Relationship of Economic Theory to Experiments: Treatment driven Experiments” in “Methods of Modern Experimental Economics”, edited by Guillaume Frechette and Andrew Schotter, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

WORKING PAPERS

1. Niederle, Muriel, Carmit Segal, and Lise Vesterlund, “How Costly is Diversity? Affirmative Action in Light of Gender Differences in Competitiveness” March 2010, Instructions.

2. Coles, Peter, Alexey Kushnir and Muriel Niederle, “Preference Signaling in Matching Markets”, July 2010, Appendix and Extension.

3. Niederle, Muriel and Alexandra H. Yestrumskas, “Gender Differences in Seeking Challenges: The Role of Institutions”, February 2008.

4. Featherstone, Clayton and Muriel Niederle, “Ex Ante Efficiency in School Choice Mechanisms: An Experimental Investigation”, December 2008.

5. Niederle, Muriel and Leeat Yariv, “Decentralized Matching with Aligned Preferences”, March 2009.

6. Niederle, Muriel, Alvin E. Roth and M. Utku Unver, “Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply”, working paper, March 2010.

7. Lee, Soohyung, and Muriel Niederle, “Propose with a Rose? Signaling in Internet Dating Markets,” working paper, December 2009.

8. Mobius, Markus M., Muriel Niederle, Paul Niehaus and Tanya Rosenblat, “Self-Confidence Management: Theory and Experimental Evidence”, May 2010.

9. Niederle, Muriel, “Identity: Individual Traits, Discrimination and Groups”, in preparation for the 2^nd Handbook in Experimental Economics, editors John Kagel and Alvin E. Roth, Princeton University Press.

Job Market Candidates 2009 – 2010

Stanford Students:

Ned Augenblick is an applied economist with strong interests in market design and behavioral economics. His skill set include theory, (field) experiments and empirical skills. His job market paper analyzes Swoopo: an online auction where bidders have pay to place a bid.

Clayton Featherstone SOLD: Taking a two-year post-doc with Alvin E. Roth at the Harvard Business School. He is a market designer with theory papers, experiments and field work. He is currently working on school choice in the San Francisco United School District.

US students:

Lucas Coffman is a Harvard student with strong interests in lab and field experiments and development economics. He has a paper using lab and field experiments that shows the behavioral role of intermediation on both punishment, but also rewards. In a second development paper he uses field experiments in Brazil to analyze schooling decisions of poor households.

Alexey Kushnir is a fourth year theory student from Penn State. His job market paper is on signaling in matching markets. The focus is on preference signaling and related to the AEA job market signaling. He has ongoing theory projects close to completion on allocation problems via contests.

European Student:

Marie-Pierre Dargnies: is a student at the University of Paris 1, in France. She is an experimental economist. She has a very nice paper on gender differences in team competition.

Graduate Students not on the market

Matthew Elliott: A theorist to be.

Eric Mayefsky: An experimental economist to be.

Press Coverage (select)

Business Week “Are Women Less Competitive?,” Economic Trends, by Gene Koretz, December 9, 2002.

The Economist, “Be a man,” June 28, 2003, (and subsequently in many other newspapers, radio shows and webforums).

American Medical News, “Harvard economist argues that Match is not anticompetitive”, September 13, 2003.

Harvard Murmur Weekly, Opinion, December 8, 2003.

New York Times, “Tweaking the Math to Make Happier Medical Marriages,” Sara Robison, August 24, 2004.

The Niederle and Roth, JAMA 2003 paper also receives some advertisement through webpages of the American Medical Association that inform about the process of the class action lawsuit

(e.g. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/11015.html), and the webpage http://www.savethematch.org/ put together by the NRMP to, well, save the match…

New York Times, “What Women Want,” Column by John Tierney, May 24, 2005 (discussed in many other newspapers and forums).

New York Times, “The Difference Between Men and Women, Revisited: It's About Competition”, Economic Scene by Hal Varian, March 9, 2006.

Wall Street Journal, “Economists Learn Matchmaker Role”, by Mark Whitehouse, January 8, 2007 (reprinted by lots of “free” journals, e.g. the Daily Report).

Pages of (Young) Experimental Economists

Here are a few webpages of economists doing experiments, and who post their papers on the web. Many of these are coauthors / friends, and the others are young experimenters. With these restrictions, the list is not (and not meant to be) complete, for a more complete list, see Al Roth’s game theory and experimental economics page . Nonetheless, suggestions welcome!

Dan Ariely is a psychologist with an interest in economics.

Gary Charness is at UC Santa Barbara.

Yan Chen is at Michigan, and is also interested in matching, working with Tayfun Sonmez.

Martin Dufwenberg is at the University of Arizona.

Guillaume Frechette is at NYU and works on bargaining and political economy experiments.

Uri Gneezy is at the UCSD business school, and has many experiments on all kinds of topics.

Jacob Goeree is in Amsterdam, combining theory and experiments.

Bill Harbaugh runs experiments with children.

Shachar Kariv is a young experimenter at UC Berkeley, also working on theory, and interested in herding.

Dean Karlan is at Princeton, and has some exiting work that combines experiments with outside the lab behavior.

Georg Kirchsteiger is my coauthor and now in Maastricht.

Jan Potters, a coauthor of mine at Tilburg.

Tanya Rosenblat has experiments with Markus Moebius, some of them on trust.

Bob Slonim is at Case Western.

Lise Vesterlund is at Pittsburgh, and one of her interests is public goods, combining experiments and theory, she also works on gender differences and on one project with me.

Georg Weizsaecker is at LSE and works with Dorothea Kuebler.

Pages of Economists interested in Matching

Here are a few webpages of economists interested in matching, and who post their matching papers on the web… Suggestions welcome!

Atila Abdulkadiroglu is at Columbia University.

Li Gan is at Texas Austin, and has also some work in matching.

Bettina Klaus is at Maastricht.
Jon Levin is my colleague at Stanford, and has a nice matching paper with Jeremy Bulow.

Li, Hao works with Ettore Damiano and Wing Suen.
Michael Ostrovsky is a Harvard graduate student, with several papers on matching, some with Michael Schwarz.

Al Roth, has an extensive webpage on his work on matching, and also links to several matching problems.
Tayfun Sonmez works at Koc University.

Morten Sorensen is an empirical IO economist, who analyzes the matching of venture capitalists to projects.
Utku Unver is also at Koc.

Matching Problems and Market Design Resources on the Internet

Well, this will require a bit more time and thought, but suggestions are more than welcome…!

Meanwhile, you may want to see the more than extensive collection at Al Roth’s homepage....