Margaret Samahita
Biographic Data
| ID | 4267100 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Margaret Samahita |
| GIVEN NAMES | Margaret |
| FAMILY NAME | Samahita |
| SIGNATURE | SAMAHITA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8693-1185 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
“Luxury beliefs”
Vulnerability to and acceptability of different types of sludge
Sludge is one of the most important yet underappreciated problems in modern society. Examples of sludge include unnecessarily complex paperwork requirements, hard-to-navigate documents and websites, long waiting time, and unfriendly or confusing staff interactions. However, little is known about whether some people are more vulnerable to and less accepting of some types of sludge than others. Drawing on data from a nationally representative surve…
Anchoring and subjective belief distributions
We investigate how the anchoring effect—a well-established cognitive bias—influences subjective belief distributions. While prior research extensively examines the impact of anchoring and other biases on point estimates, their effect on the underlying distribution and its higher moments remains unexplored. Using two pre-registered online experiments (N = 1467) and two elicitation methods, we find that anchoring impacts not just the mean, but also…
Are Economics Conferences Gender‐Neutral? Evidence from Ireland
We study gender inequality in conference acceptance using data from the Irish Economic Association annual conference from 2016 to 2022, exploiting the introduction of anonymized submission in 2021 to study the effect of blinding. While no gender gap is observed in organizers' acceptance decisions, there is an indication of gender difference favouring the in‐group at the reviewer stage. In particular, male reviewers persistently give higher scores…
Compliance Spending Aversion
Charities are increasingly required to spend more resources on administrative tasks to comply with regulations. Given previous findings on donors’ overhead aversion, namely that donors avoid giving to charities with a high ratio of overhead relative to program spending, we investigate whether donors also penalize charities that spend high shares of donations on administrative compliance tasks, despite these tasks being outside the charities’ cont…
No mood effects in the field
We study mood effect in the field to measure its economic impact and address shortcomings in the existing literature, which typically uses one single mood proxy and ignores selection effects. Using over 50 million car inspections in Sweden and England and multiple mood proxies, we study whether car inspectors are more lenient on good mood days and if car owners self-select into those days. We find evidence of a “Friday effect” in England and a sm…
Can ❤s Change Minds? Social Media Endorsements and Policy Preferences
We investigate the effect of social media endorsements (likes, retweets, shares) on individuals' policy preferences. In two pre-registered online experiments ( N = 1,384), we exposed participants to non-neutral policy messages about the COVID-19 pandemic (emphasizing either public health or economic activity as a policy priority) while varying the level of endorsements of these messages. Our experimental treatment did not result in aggregate chan…
What drives home solar PV uptake? Subsidies, peer effects and visibility in Sweden
What drives home solar PV uptake? Subsidies, peer effects and visibility in Sweden
Can ❤s Change Minds? Social Media Endorsements and Policy Preferences
We investigate the effect of social media endorsements (likes, retweets, shares) on individuals' policy preferences. In two pre-registered online experiments ( N = 1,384), we exposed participants to non-neutral policy messages about the COVID-19 pandemic (emphasizing either public health or economic activity as a policy priority) while varying the level of endorsements of these messages. Our experimental treatment did not result in aggregate chan…
What drives home solar PV uptake? Subsidies, peer effects and visibility in Sweden
Compliance Spending Aversion
Charities are increasingly required to spend more resources on administrative tasks to comply with regulations. Given previous findings on donors’ overhead aversion, namely that donors avoid giving to charities with a high ratio of overhead relative to program spending, we investigate whether donors also penalize charities that spend high shares of donations on administrative compliance tasks, despite these tasks being outside the charities’ cont…
No mood effects in the field
We study mood effect in the field to measure its economic impact and address shortcomings in the existing literature, which typically uses one single mood proxy and ignores selection effects. Using over 50 million car inspections in Sweden and England and multiple mood proxies, we study whether car inspectors are more lenient on good mood days and if car owners self-select into those days. We find evidence of a “Friday effect” in England and a sm…
Can ❤s Change Minds? Social Media Endorsements and Policy Preferences
We investigate the effect of social media endorsements (likes, retweets, shares) on individuals' policy preferences. In two pre-registered online experiments ( N = 1,384), we exposed participants to non-neutral policy messages about the COVID-19 pandemic (emphasizing either public health or economic activity as a policy priority) while varying the level of endorsements of these messages. Our experimental treatment did not result in aggregate chan…
Are Economics Conferences Gender‐Neutral? Evidence from Ireland
We study gender inequality in conference acceptance using data from the Irish Economic Association annual conference from 2016 to 2022, exploiting the introduction of anonymized submission in 2021 to study the effect of blinding. While no gender gap is observed in organizers' acceptance decisions, there is an indication of gender difference favouring the in‐group at the reviewer stage. In particular, male reviewers persistently give higher scores…
Vulnerability to and acceptability of different types of sludge
Sludge is one of the most important yet underappreciated problems in modern society. Examples of sludge include unnecessarily complex paperwork requirements, hard-to-navigate documents and websites, long waiting time, and unfriendly or confusing staff interactions. However, little is known about whether some people are more vulnerable to and less accepting of some types of sludge than others. Drawing on data from a nationally representative surve…
Anchoring and subjective belief distributions
We investigate how the anchoring effect—a well-established cognitive bias—influences subjective belief distributions. While prior research extensively examines the impact of anchoring and other biases on point estimates, their effect on the underlying distribution and its higher moments remains unexplored. Using two pre-registered online experiments (N = 1467) and two elicitation methods, we find that anchoring impacts not just the mean, but also…
“Luxury beliefs”
Psychology (5 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Affect (linguistics (3 works) · Business (3 works) · Economics (3 works) · Computer Science (2 works) · Demographic economics (2 works) · Law (2 works) · Medicine (2 works) · Political science (2 works)