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Dreber Almenberg, Anna

I'm the Johan Björkman professor of economics at the Department of Economics, mainly doing meta-science and behavioral and experimental economics.

I am an Editor at the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Political Economy.

I am a Wallenberg Scholar, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA), and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA). I am also affiliated with the Department of Economics at the University of Innsbruck and the Credence Goods, Incentives and Behavior group.

I am mainly interested in meta-science, where the focus is on the credibility or reliability of scientific results. We perform replications – typically meaning that experimental studies are redone using the same methods as in the original papers but on new and larger samples – and we also set up prediction markets and forecasting surveys to see whether researchers can predict replication outcomes as well as the outcomes of new hypothesis tests. We have done replications in experimental economics (Camerer et al. 2016), for social science experiments published in Nature and Science (Camerer et al. 2018), and we were also part of the big replication project in psychology (Open Science Collaboration 2015). These papers also include prediction markets, and our first paper on that topic is Dreber et al. 2015. Here is a summary of much of this in Swedish. In these projects we typically find that a substantial share of results does not replicate, and there is something systematic about which results replicate that the prediction markets can pick up.

We are also doing multi-analyst studies where we ask many researchers to test the same hypotheses on the same data. The results typically suggest a lot of variation in results for a given hypothesis – see Botvinik-Nezer et al. 2020 for neuroscience and Menkveld et al. 2021 for finance.

If you are interested in reproducing or replicating studies, see the Institute for Replication where there are many such possibilities!

I am also interested in variation in economic preferences between and within individuals. In older projects we for example looked at variation in gender differences in preferences in different countries and samples, see e.g. Cárdenas et al. 2011 where we do similar experiments in Colombia and Sweden. In other projects we try to understand why women typically ask for less in wage negotiations (Dreber et al. 2022). We also study whether there are hormonal causes for individual variation in preferences and do large hormone administration projects. In Ranehill et al. 2015 we administer the contraceptive pill or placebo to 340 women for a period of 3 months and find no effects of the pill vs placebo on economic decision making (altruism, risk taking and willingness to compete). We also find no menstrual cycle effects. We also do not find that a putative marker of prenatal testosterone exposure can predict economic preferences (see Neyse et al. 2021).

I teach Gender Economics at the MSc level and sometime supervise MSc theses in economics. I also give guest lectures in many courses, typically with a meta science focus.