Adoption

When Ben Olken gave a lecture for the Indonesia Project this summer, Rivan asked if research evidence ever gets translated to action[1]. He pointed at the findings from the Targeting RCT outlined in the lecture, and he said that the Indonesian government seemed to have not been doing anything in response to the study.

I don't fully agree with his characterization of the policy response. (And from another context, there's a new working paper by Jonas Hjort et al. which provides a hopeful picture on this question: they show officials in Brazil were more likely to adopt a policy after being informed of research.)

But I got reminded of Rivan's question again when today I stumble upon this interview of Shengwu Li in Logic Magazine. Excerpts:

Li: So in 1961 Vickrey writes a paper where he proposes a new kind of auction that combines the benefits of both formats. … Here’s how it works: everybody bids, the highest bidder wins, and then the winner pays the second-highest bid. Thus the second-price auction was born. 

Logic: What happens to Vickrey’s idea? 

Li: Mostly it gets ignored. No real auctioneers adopt this way of selling things. Then, about a half-century later, in the early 2000s, Google picks it up and dusts it off as they’re figuring out how to sell ads.

Half a century! Now that's a really long time for research adoption.

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[1] --not his exact words but it was along this line. This phrasing is lifted shamelessly from an old J-PAL tagline.