The emerging answer seems to be similar to the answer to the question: "Does Aid Work?": It depends.
We just finished up the first panel session at Microfinance Impact 2010, moderated by Jonathan Morduch, and with presentations by Dean Karlan (Yale and IPA), Abhijit Banerjee (MIT), Esther Duflo (MIT), Carlos Danel (Compartamos Banco) and Tanguy Bernard (Agence Française de Développement).
From Ghana, Suvojit Chattopadhyay writes:
---
Interesting example of the endowment effect from New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/dining/19note.html?8dpc
Summing up the quirky behaviors of his dining companions over his tenure as restaurant critic for the NY Times, Bruni describes the way his fellow diners--to whom he had randomly assigned dishes to be sampled--would become protective of "their" choices, defending their quality.
We just completed the baseline survey for one of the projects I’m working on in Cagayan de Oro, the Philippines. Consequently, I’ve been spending most of my time the last few weeks thinking about how to get good data. Getting the right information might seem simple; figure out what you want to know about people and then ask them. However, in practice getting good data proves much more difficult.
