Associate Professor of Economics
Andy Brownback
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Education
2010-2015
University of California, San Diego
PhD in Economics (2015)
Advisor: James Andreoni

2006-2010
Kansas State University
BA in Economics and Mathematics (2010)
Minors in Spanish and Statistics
Teaching
2020-Present
University of Arkansas
Micro Theory II: Graduate course in microeconomic theory including foundations of choice, game theory, asymmetric information, and imperfect competition.
Mathematics for Economists: Graduate review course on fundamental mathematics needed to study economics.
Economics of Organizations:
Undergraduate course in managerial economics, game theory, and industrial organization.

2015-2019
University of Arkansas
Industrial Organization I:
Graduate course in applied microeconomic theory and industrial organization.

2010-2015
University of California, San Diego
Teaching assistant for Game Theory, MBA Strategy, and Intermediate Microeconomics​.

About Me

I'm an associate professor of economics at the University of Arkansas specializing in behavioral and experimental economics. I use laboratory, field, and online experiments to study questions about education, health, and public policy. ​

I'm originally from Kansas where I received my bachelor's degree at Kansas State University. I received my PhD in economics from UC San Diego. ​

Grants, Awards, & Fellowships

USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture
(PI with Sherry Li, Khoa Luu, and Brandon McFadden)
2024 - 2027

Nutrition and Machine Vision ($650,000)

Arkansas biosciences institute grant
‍(PI with Sherry Li, Khoa Luu, and Brandon McFadden)
2024-2025

Nutrition and Machine Vision ($60,000)

The British Academy Research Grant
(Co-PI with Guillermo Cruces, Seung-Keun Martinez, Monika Pompeo, and silvia sonderegger)
2021 - 2022

Motivated Reasoning, Paradoxical Thinking, and COVID-19 Vaccination ($180,000)

Walton College Excellence in Research Award
2020
PEDL Major Research Grant
(Co-PI with Sarojini Hirshleifer and Arman Rezaee)
2018 - 2022

Employer beliefs, employee training, and labor market outcomes: A field experiment in Uganda ($452,000)

J-PAL Post-Primary Education Initiative
(Co-PI with Sarojini Hirshleifer and Arman Rezaee)
2018 - 2019

Employer beliefs, employee training, and labor market outcomes: A field experiment in Uganda ($16,660)

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
(PI with Alex Imas and Michael Kuhn)
2017 - 2018

Examining the impact of waiting periods on improving the use of food subsidies for healthier consumption while maintaining choice ($198,940)

Laura and John Arnold Foundation
(Co-PI with Sally Sadoff)
2016 - 2018

Improving Community College Outcomes through Performance Incentives ($312,000)

Yankelovich Foundation
(Co-PI with Sally Sadoff)
2016 - 2017

Improving Community College Outcomes through Performance Incentives ($25,000)

Russell Sage Foundation Small Grant in Behavioral Economics
(PI with Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch and Shengwu Li)
2015 - 2016

On the Elicitation of Willingness to Pay for Stigmatized Goods ($4,700)

Research

Inference from Biased Polls (with Nathaniel Burke & Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch)
Accepted, Games and Economic Behavior

Poll respondents often attempt to present a positive image by overstating virtuous behaviors. We examine whether people account for this "socially desirable responding" (SDR) when drawing inferences from poll data. In an experiment, we incentivize ``predictors'' to guess others' choice behaviors across eight actions with varying social desirability. To aid guessing, predictors observe random subsamples of (i) incentivized choices or (ii) hypothetical claims from polls. Predictors show reasonable skepticism towards hypothetical claims, which exhibit predictable SDR. However, their skepticism is not tailored to the direction or magnitude of SDR. This under-correction occurs even though subjects' explicit responses can predict SDR. [SSRN Link]

College Summer School: Educational Benefits and Enrollment Preferences (with Sally Sadoff)
Journal of Human Resources (2024) [Link]

We experimentally examine whether a policy targeting college summer school enrollment can accelerate degree progress and completion. We randomly assign summer scholarships to community college students and find a large impact on degree acceleration, increasing graduation within one year of the intervention by 32% and transfers to four-year colleges by 58%. We elicit preferences for the scholarships and find that treatment effects are concentrated among students with a preference against summer school. Our results suggest that educational impacts do not drive enrollment preferences. And, that many more students could benefit from summer school than the  minority who currently enroll. [SSRN Link]

Behavioral Food Subsidies (with Alex Imas & Michael Kuhn)
Review of Economics and Statistics (2023) [Link]

We conduct a field experiment with low-income shoppers to study how behavioral interventions can improve the effectiveness of healthy food subsidies. Our unique design enables us to deliver subsidies both before and during grocery shopping. We examine the effects of two non-restrictive changes to the choice environment: giving shoppers agency over the subsidy they receive and introducing a waiting period before a subsidized shopping trip to prompt deliberation about upcoming purchases. These interventions increase healthy food spending by 61% more than a healthy food subsidy alone, resulting in 199% greater healthy spending than in our unsubsidized control group. [SSRN Link]

Improving College Instruction through Incentives (with Sally Sadoff)
Journal of Political Economy (2020) [Link]

In a field experiment, we examine the impact of performance-based incentives for community college instructors. Instructor incentives improve student exam scores, course grades, and credit accumulation while reducing course dropout. Effects are largest among part-time adjunct instructors. During the program, instructor incentives have large positive spillovers, increasing completion rates and grades in students’ courses outside our study. One year after the program, instructor incentives increase transfer rates to 4-year colleges with no impact on 2-year college degrees. We find no evidence of complementarities between instructor incentives and student incentives. Finally, while instructors initially prefer gain-framed contracts over our loss-framed ones, preferences for loss-framed contracts significantly increase after experience with them. [PDF]

Understanding Outcome Bias (with Michael Kuhn)
Games and Economic Behavior (2019) [Link]

Disentangling effort and luck is critical when judging performance. In a principal-agent experiment, we demonstrate that principals' judgments of agent effort are biased by luck, despite perfectly observing the agent's effort. We find that two potential solutions to this "outcome bias"—the opportunity to avoid irrelevant information about luck, and outsourcing judgment to independent third parties—are ineffective.  When we give control over information about luck to principals and agents in separate treatments, we find asymmetric sophistication: agents strategically manipulate principals' outcome bias, but principals fail to recognize their own bias. Independent third parties are just as biased as principals. These findings indicate that the scope of outcome bias may be larger than previously understood and that outcome bias cannot be driven solely by emotional responses nor distributional preferences. Instead, we hypothesize that luck directly affects beliefs, and we test this hypothesis by eliciting the beliefs of third parties and principals. Lucky agents are believed to exert more effort than identical, unlucky agents. We propose a model of biased belief updating explaining these results.

Social Desirability Bias and Polling Errors in the 2016 Presidential Election (with Aaron Novotny)
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (2018) [Link]

Social scientists have observed that socially desirable responding (SDR) often biases unincentivized surveys. Nonetheless, media, campaigns, and markets all employ unincentivized polls to make predictions about electoral outcomes. During the 2016 presidential campaign, we conducted three list experiments to test the effect SDR has on polls of agreement with presidential candidates. We elicit a subject's agreement with either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump using explicit questioning or an implicit elicitation that allows subjects to conceal their individual responses. We find evidence that explicit polling overstates agreement with Clinton relative to Trump. Subgroup analysis by party identification shows that SDR significantly diminishes explicit statements of agreement with the opposing party's candidate, driven largely by Democrats who are significantly less likely to explicitly state agreement with Trump. We measure economic policy preferences and find no evidence that ideological agreement drives SDR. We find suggestive evidence that local voting patterns predict SDR. [PDF]

A Classroom Experiment on Effort Allocation under Relative Grading
Economics of Education Review (2018) [Link]

Grading on the curve is a form of relative evaluation similar to an all-pay auction or rank-order tournament. The distribution of students drawn into the class from the population is predictably linked to the size of the class. Increasing the class size draws students' percentile ranks closer to their population percentiles. Since grades are awarded based on percentile ranks in the class, this reallocates incentives for effort between students with different abilities. The predicted aggregate effort and the predicted effort from high-ability students increases while the predicted effort from low-ability students decreases. Andreoni and Brownback (2017) find that the size of a contest has a causal impact on the aggregate effort from participants and the distribution of effort among heterogeneous agents. In this paper, I randomly assign "class sizes" to quizzes in an economics course to test these predictions in a real-stakes environment. My within-subjects design controls for student, classroom, and time confounds and finds that the lower variance of larger classes elicits greater effort from all but the lowest-ability students, significantly increasing aggregate effort. [PDF]

All-Pay Auctions and Group Size: Grading on the Curve and Other Applications (with James Andreoni)
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2017) [Link]

We model contests with a fixed proportion of prizes, such as a grading curve, as all-pay auctions where higher effort weakly increases the likelihood of a prize. We find theoretical predictions for the heterogeneous effect auction size has on effort from high- and low-types. We test our predictions in a laboratory experiment that compares behavior in two-bidder, one-prize auctions with behavior in 20-bidder, 10-prize auctions. We find a statistically significant 11.8% increase in aggregate bidding when moving from the small to large auction. The impact is heterogeneous: as the auction size increases, low-types decrease effort but high-types increase effort. Additionally, the larger auction provides a stronger rank-correlation between effort and ability, awarding more prizes to the higher-skilled and improving the efficiency of prize allocation. [NBER link]

Works in Progress

Time-Preferences and Food choice (with Alex Imas & Michael Kuhn)
Revision Requested at the Journal of Public Economics

Healthy food choices are a canonical example used to illustrate the importance of time preferences in behavioral economics. However, the literature lacks a direct demonstration that they are well-predicted by incentivized time preference measures. We offer direct evidence by combining a novel, two-question, incentivized time preference measurement with data from a field experiment that includes grocery purchases and consumption. Our present-focus measure is highly predictive of food choice, capturing a number of behaviors consistent with self-control problems, which provides direct evidence for the common assumption that important aspects of nutrition are driven by time preferences. [NBER Link]

Effect of Informational COVID-19 Vaccine Videos on Perceptions of Vaccination Among Unvaccinated Individuals (with Guillermo Cruces, Seung-Keun Martinez, Monika Pompeo, & Silvia Sonderegger)
Under review

Importance: By early 2022, COVID-19 vaccine uptake plateaued, resulting in unnecessary hospitalisations and deaths. With the widespread adoption mRNA vaccines, new messaging strategies are needed for those who remain highly hesitant to accept these new-age immunizations.
Objective: Our experiment tested whether those who remained unvaccinated late into the pandemic were willfully avoiding vaccine information, or if they would voluntarily seek vaccine education that could allow them to make more informed choices.
Setting & Participants: For this single-blind, between-subjects, randomised controlled trial, we recruited 7090 US residents who remained unvaccinated in 2022 to participate in our online survey-experiment.
Interventions & Design: We developed informational interventions designed build people’s understanding of COVID-19 vaccines by means of detailed yet easy-to-grasp videos that explain mRNA vaccine technology, research and development, testing and safety protocols, and potential side effects. Participants were randomised into three groups: (1) a control group who watched an unrelated placebo video, (2) a “video optional” group for whom every informational video was optional, and (3) a “video required” group for whom the vaccine technology video was mandatory, but all other videos were optional.
Main Outcomes: Primary endpoints were future vaccine uptake intentions, vaccine efficacy beliefs, vaccine safety beliefs, and trust in healthcare institutions (measured on a 100-point scale). Secondary endpoints measured information seeking behaviour.
Results: 60% (95% CI: 58.6–62.2) of the participants in the video required group chose to watch optional videos, and 55% (95% CI: 51.9–57.3) of participants in the video optional group watched at least one video. The video required group exhibited a 6% (95% CI: 2%–10%), improvement in stated vaccine intentions, an 11% (95% CI: 8%–15%) improvement in vaccine efficacy beliefs, an 8% (95% CI: 3%–14%) decrease in side effects concerns, and a 7% (95% CI: 4%–10%) percent increase in the trust of health care institutions. The video optional group yielded improvements of 7%, 6%, 16%, and 5% in the respective categories (95% CIs: 2%–13%, 2%–11%, 8%–24%, 0%–9%, respectively).
Conclusion & Relevance: Participants displayed high willingness to voluntarily seek information on mRNA vaccine technology. Further, our informational videos softened antivaccination sentiments and improved vaccine intentions. These results demonstrate that even the most vaccine-resistant individuals are willing to learn about mRNA vaccines and that a disinterested, educational approach may be best suited to reach them. [SSRN Link]

Beliefs and the Demand for Employee Training: A Field Experiment with Small Firms in Uganda (with Isaac Ahimbisibwe, Sarojini Hirshleifer, & Arman Rezaee)
In Progress
Outcome Bias: Complexity and Moral Luck
In Progress