pull down to refresh
69 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 3h \ on: Stacker Saloon
@Undisciplined
What's your view on structural modeling in economics? I'm debating whether to write down a structural model of user behavior on Stacker News. Not sure if it's a worthwhile endeavor though.
I started off as a structural micro guy, but later moved away from it because they take way too long to work with, and the juice usually wasn't worth the squeeze. At a more fundamental level, no one should believe these structural models as accurate depictions of reality anyway, so why bother? Now I prefer to just focus on solid reduced form empirical results that tell a story, and I've also had better publishing success that way.
I feel similarly. When I've done anything structural it's been because I wasn't getting consistent results across similarly plausible specifications.
I almost entirely do reduced form estimation and that's what I primarily trained in. If you have a neat toy model of stacker behavior, I'd say go for it, but the incentives (and how well they're understood) don't strike me as being straightforward to model. It seems to me like you'd need to define different types of stackers and articulate the rewards system.
I would be very interested in trying to understand how closely behavior aligns with the rewards incentives, though. I've always thought that most of us are probably leaving lots of sats on the table by not optimizing.
reply