Behavioral Insights: Groundhog Day, Dunning-Kruger effect, Heterogeneous Effects, Interest-Based Advertising, Downhill Mountain Biking...

Behavioral Insights.

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👋 Hi friends, here is a new Behavioral Insights. In this week's newsletter articles on Groundhog Day, Dunning-Kruger effect, heterogeneous effects, interest-based advertising and some downhill mountain biking fun.

1. Groundhog Day 📆
Is this life in lockdown mode starting to feel like Groundhog Day? Try to see it as an opportunity to do it a bit better than yesterday. Read the article

2. Is the Dunning-Kruger effect real? Probably not ❌
"The Dunning-Kruger effect was originally described in 1999 as the observation that people who are terrible at a particular task think they are much better than they are, while people who are very good at it tend to underestimate their competence.

Scientists now see the effect also in random, computer-generated data, so it may not be a real flaw in our thinking and thus may not really exist." Read the article

3. Causal Conversations 💬
Guillaume Basse and Iav Bojinov, two assistant professors from Stanford and Harvard, launched a new website explaining causal inference and experimental design. The articles are written in a very accessible manner. I especially like their latest post 'An intuitive introduction to heterogeneous effects in experiments'

4. A/B testing in marketplaces 🧪
LinkedIn is trying to solve the specific challenges they have with doing A/B testing in a marketplace setting. Read the article

5. Interest-based advertising 🍪
With 3rd party cookies soon disappearing, Google is testing different ways to give advertisers insights in the impact of advertising. The first simulations with interest-based advertising models indicate "that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising." Read the article

6. Feeling unproductive? ✔️
This Harvard Business Review editor tried a couple of different ways to keep track of tasks: "Over four days, I tried four ways of organizing my to-do list. I tracked my overall productivity and stress levels to see which worked best." Read the article

7. Is digital advertising a bubble ready to burst? 🎧
Tim Hwang talks about his new book 'Subprime Attention Crisis' on the Digital Analytics Power Hour podcast. Find it here

😉 Fun link of the week:
Scottish mountain biker Danny MacAskill walked his bike up a Scottish mountain and raced down in 6 exhilarating minutes. Beautifully captured by a drone and Go-Pro camera. Makes you want to go outdoors even more.

Until next week, keep experimenting.
— Kevin