Past Session
Monday, April 7, 2025
17:30h
Presented by
Mikhail Galashin (UCLA)
https://www.mgalashin.com/

Market for Answers: Integrating Сommunity Information in Survey Design (with Alena Buinskaya)

Abstract

We propose a framework for survey design as a market interaction. In our model, respondents choose answer options closest to their true beliefs, forming demand, while crowdsourced contributors supply options under both monetary and non-monetary incentive schemes. This framework yields two theoretically grounded metrics for evaluating the quality of answer sets for multiple-choice questions: (1) consumer surplus, measured as the semantic similarity between the chosen option and the respondent's true beliefs, and (2) market share, defined as the probability of selecting any option from the set. We propose a method for estimating demand that leverages text embeddings, a recent advance in natural language processing. To validate the model, we conduct an experiment and find that the demand model successfully predicts respondent choices. On the supply side, we find that while monetary incentives improve crowdsourced options, supplier characteristics—particularly their own beliefs about the question of interest—play a larger role. Our results suggest that selecting an appropriate crowdsourcing population may be more important than incentive design for obtaining high-quality survey options.

About this workshop

The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.

The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.

Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.