Kirk Bansak
Biographic Data
| ID | 946594 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kirk Bansak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kirk |
| FAMILY NAME | Bansak |
| SIGNATURE | BANSAK K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0229-9694 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 188 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Odd Profiles in Conjoint Experimental Designs: Effects on Survey-Taking Attention and Behavior
Scholars often face a choice when designing conjoint experiments: to allow for or to exclude “odd” combinations of attribute levels in the randomized conjoint profiles shown to respondents (such as a profile of a Democratic candidate who does not support abortion rights or an individual who is a medical doctor but does not have a graduate degree). While previous work has studied the statistical and theoretical implications of this decision, there…
How membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization transforms public support for war
How do military alliances affect public support for defending targets of aggression? We studied this question by fielding an experiment on 14,000 voters in 13 member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Our experiment involved a hypothetical scenario in which Russia attacked a target country. We randomly varied the identity of the target (Bosnia, Finland, Georgia, or Sweden), and whether the target was a member of NATO at t…
Using Conjoint Experiments to Analyze Election Outcomes: The Essential Role of the Average Marginal Component Effect
Political scientists have increasingly deployed conjoint survey experiments to understand multidimensional choices in various settings. In this paper, we show that the average marginal component effect (AMCE) constitutes an aggregation of individual-level preferences that is meaningful both theoretically and empirically. First, extending previous results to allow for arbitrary randomization distributions, we show how the AMCE represents a summary…
Are Subnational Policymakers' Policy Preferences Nationalized? Evidence from Surveys of Township, Municipal, County, and State Officials
An ongoing debate in American politics concerns the extent to which subnational politics has become “nationalized.” We advance this debate by collecting issue‐position data on four distinct policy topics from unprecedented national surveys of public officials at both the local and state levels. We then combine this survey data with precinct‐level presidential vote‐share data that is tabulated to match the boundary of each survey respondent's gove…
Combining Outcome-Based and Preference-Based Matching: A Constrained Priority Mechanism
We introduce a constrained priority mechanism that combines outcome-based matching from machine learning with preference-based allocation schemes common in market design. Using real-world data, we illustrate how our mechanism could be applied to the assignment of refugee families to host country locations, and kindergarteners to schools. Our mechanism allows a planner to first specify a threshold $\bar g$ for the minimum acceptable average outcom…
Conjoint Survey Experiments
Conjoint survey experiments have become a popular method for analyzing multidimensional preferences in political science. If properly implemented, conjoint experiments can obtain reliable measures of multidimensional preferences and estimate causal effects of multiple attributes on hypothetical choices or evaluations. This chapter provides an accessible overview of the methodology for designing, implementing, and analyzing conjoint survey experim…
Using Eye-Tracking to Understand Decision-Making in Conjoint Experiments
Conjoint experiments are popular, but there is a paucity of research on respondents’ underlying decision-making processes. We leverage eye-tracking methodology and a series of conjoint experiments, administered to university students and local community members, to examine how respondents process information in conjoint surveys. There are two main findings. First, attribute importance measures inferred from the stated choice data are correlated w…
Why Austerity? The Mass Politics of a Contested Policy
The effects of austerity in response to financial crises are widely contested and assumed to cause significant electoral backlash. Nonetheless, governments routinely adopt austerity when confronting economic downturns and swelling deficits. We explore this puzzle by distinguishing public acceptance of austerity as a general approach and support for specific austerity packages. Using original survey data from five European countries, we show that …
Left-Right Ideology and the Debate over International Bailouts: The Case of Grexit
What explains the sharp divide in European public attitudes toward Grexit? We explore this question using original surveys from four of the largest European economies. We contend that differences in economic self-interest, and the often-mentioned chasm between supporters of mainstream and extremist parties, provide little insight into the public divide over Grexit. Instead, we show that the key factor is the split between the left and the right. …
Comparative Causal Mediation and Relaxing the Assumption of No Mediator–Outcome Confounding: An Application to International Law and Audience Costs
Experiments often include multiple treatments, with the primary goal to compare the causal effects of those treatments. This study focuses on comparing the causal anatomies of multiple treatments through the use of causal mediation analysis. It proposes a novel set of comparative causal mediation (CCM) estimands that compare the mediation effects of different treatments via a common mediator. Further, it derives the properties of a set of estimat…
Why Austerity? The Mass Politics of a Contested Policy
Can nonexperts really emulate statistical learning methods? A comment on “The accuracy, fairness, and limits of predicting recidivism
Recent research has questioned the value of statistical learning methods for producing accurate predictions in the criminal justice context. Using results from respondents on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurkers) who were asked to predict recidivism, Dressel and Farid (2018) argue that nonexperts can achieve predictive accuracy and fairness on par with algorithmic approaches that employ statistical learning models. Analyzing the same data from the or…
Europeans support a proportional allocation of asylum seekers
Using Conjoint Experiments to Analyze Election Outcomes: The Essential Role of the Average Marginal Component Effect
Political scientists have increasingly deployed conjoint survey experiments to understand multidimensional choices in various settings. In this paper, we show that the average marginal component effect (AMCE) constitutes an aggregation of individual-level preferences that is meaningful both theoretically and empirically. First, extending previous results to allow for arbitrary randomization distributions, we show how the AMCE represents a summary…
Why Austerity? The Mass Politics of a Contested Policy
The effects of austerity in response to financial crises are widely contested and assumed to cause significant electoral backlash. Nonetheless, governments routinely adopt austerity when confronting economic downturns and swelling deficits. We explore this puzzle by distinguishing public acceptance of austerity as a general approach and support for specific austerity packages. Using original survey data from five European countries, we show that …
Using Eye-Tracking to Understand Decision-Making in Conjoint Experiments
Conjoint experiments are popular, but there is a paucity of research on respondents’ underlying decision-making processes. We leverage eye-tracking methodology and a series of conjoint experiments, administered to university students and local community members, to examine how respondents process information in conjoint surveys. There are two main findings. First, attribute importance measures inferred from the stated choice data are correlated w…
Europeans support a proportional allocation of asylum seekers
Are Subnational Policymakers' Policy Preferences Nationalized? Evidence from Surveys of Township, Municipal, County, and State Officials
An ongoing debate in American politics concerns the extent to which subnational politics has become “nationalized.” We advance this debate by collecting issue‐position data on four distinct policy topics from unprecedented national surveys of public officials at both the local and state levels. We then combine this survey data with precinct‐level presidential vote‐share data that is tabulated to match the boundary of each survey respondent's gove…
Left-Right Ideology and the Debate over International Bailouts: The Case of Grexit
What explains the sharp divide in European public attitudes toward Grexit? We explore this question using original surveys from four of the largest European economies. We contend that differences in economic self-interest, and the often-mentioned chasm between supporters of mainstream and extremist parties, provide little insight into the public divide over Grexit. Instead, we show that the key factor is the split between the left and the right. …
Odd Profiles in Conjoint Experimental Designs: Effects on Survey-Taking Attention and Behavior
Scholars often face a choice when designing conjoint experiments: to allow for or to exclude “odd” combinations of attribute levels in the randomized conjoint profiles shown to respondents (such as a profile of a Democratic candidate who does not support abortion rights or an individual who is a medical doctor but does not have a graduate degree). While previous work has studied the statistical and theoretical implications of this decision, there…
Combining Outcome-Based and Preference-Based Matching: A Constrained Priority Mechanism
We introduce a constrained priority mechanism that combines outcome-based matching from machine learning with preference-based allocation schemes common in market design. Using real-world data, we illustrate how our mechanism could be applied to the assignment of refugee families to host country locations, and kindergarteners to schools. Our mechanism allows a planner to first specify a threshold $\bar g$ for the minimum acceptable average outcom…
Comparative Causal Mediation and Relaxing the Assumption of No Mediator–Outcome Confounding: An Application to International Law and Audience Costs
Experiments often include multiple treatments, with the primary goal to compare the causal effects of those treatments. This study focuses on comparing the causal anatomies of multiple treatments through the use of causal mediation analysis. It proposes a novel set of comparative causal mediation (CCM) estimands that compare the mediation effects of different treatments via a common mediator. Further, it derives the properties of a set of estimat…
Can nonexperts really emulate statistical learning methods? A comment on “The accuracy, fairness, and limits of predicting recidivism
Recent research has questioned the value of statistical learning methods for producing accurate predictions in the criminal justice context. Using results from respondents on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurkers) who were asked to predict recidivism, Dressel and Farid (2018) argue that nonexperts can achieve predictive accuracy and fairness on par with algorithmic approaches that employ statistical learning models. Analyzing the same data from the or…
Europeans support a proportional allocation of asylum seekers
Why Austerity? The Mass Politics of a Contested Policy
Can nonexperts really emulate statistical learning methods? A comment on “The accuracy, fairness, and limits of predicting recidivism
Recent research has questioned the value of statistical learning methods for producing accurate predictions in the criminal justice context. Using results from respondents on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurkers) who were asked to predict recidivism, Dressel and Farid (2018) argue that nonexperts can achieve predictive accuracy and fairness on par with algorithmic approaches that employ statistical learning models. Analyzing the same data from the or…
Left-Right Ideology and the Debate over International Bailouts: The Case of Grexit
What explains the sharp divide in European public attitudes toward Grexit? We explore this question using original surveys from four of the largest European economies. We contend that differences in economic self-interest, and the often-mentioned chasm between supporters of mainstream and extremist parties, provide little insight into the public divide over Grexit. Instead, we show that the key factor is the split between the left and the right. …
Comparative Causal Mediation and Relaxing the Assumption of No Mediator–Outcome Confounding: An Application to International Law and Audience Costs
Experiments often include multiple treatments, with the primary goal to compare the causal effects of those treatments. This study focuses on comparing the causal anatomies of multiple treatments through the use of causal mediation analysis. It proposes a novel set of comparative causal mediation (CCM) estimands that compare the mediation effects of different treatments via a common mediator. Further, it derives the properties of a set of estimat…
Conjoint Survey Experiments
Conjoint survey experiments have become a popular method for analyzing multidimensional preferences in political science. If properly implemented, conjoint experiments can obtain reliable measures of multidimensional preferences and estimate causal effects of multiple attributes on hypothetical choices or evaluations. This chapter provides an accessible overview of the methodology for designing, implementing, and analyzing conjoint survey experim…
Using Eye-Tracking to Understand Decision-Making in Conjoint Experiments
Conjoint experiments are popular, but there is a paucity of research on respondents’ underlying decision-making processes. We leverage eye-tracking methodology and a series of conjoint experiments, administered to university students and local community members, to examine how respondents process information in conjoint surveys. There are two main findings. First, attribute importance measures inferred from the stated choice data are correlated w…
Why Austerity? The Mass Politics of a Contested Policy
The effects of austerity in response to financial crises are widely contested and assumed to cause significant electoral backlash. Nonetheless, governments routinely adopt austerity when confronting economic downturns and swelling deficits. We explore this puzzle by distinguishing public acceptance of austerity as a general approach and support for specific austerity packages. Using original survey data from five European countries, we show that …
Combining Outcome-Based and Preference-Based Matching: A Constrained Priority Mechanism
We introduce a constrained priority mechanism that combines outcome-based matching from machine learning with preference-based allocation schemes common in market design. Using real-world data, we illustrate how our mechanism could be applied to the assignment of refugee families to host country locations, and kindergarteners to schools. Our mechanism allows a planner to first specify a threshold $\bar g$ for the minimum acceptable average outcom…
How membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization transforms public support for war
How do military alliances affect public support for defending targets of aggression? We studied this question by fielding an experiment on 14,000 voters in 13 member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Our experiment involved a hypothetical scenario in which Russia attacked a target country. We randomly varied the identity of the target (Bosnia, Finland, Georgia, or Sweden), and whether the target was a member of NATO at t…
Using Conjoint Experiments to Analyze Election Outcomes: The Essential Role of the Average Marginal Component Effect
Political scientists have increasingly deployed conjoint survey experiments to understand multidimensional choices in various settings. In this paper, we show that the average marginal component effect (AMCE) constitutes an aggregation of individual-level preferences that is meaningful both theoretically and empirically. First, extending previous results to allow for arbitrary randomization distributions, we show how the AMCE represents a summary…
Are Subnational Policymakers' Policy Preferences Nationalized? Evidence from Surveys of Township, Municipal, County, and State Officials
An ongoing debate in American politics concerns the extent to which subnational politics has become “nationalized.” We advance this debate by collecting issue‐position data on four distinct policy topics from unprecedented national surveys of public officials at both the local and state levels. We then combine this survey data with precinct‐level presidential vote‐share data that is tabulated to match the boundary of each survey respondent's gove…
Odd Profiles in Conjoint Experimental Designs: Effects on Survey-Taking Attention and Behavior
Scholars often face a choice when designing conjoint experiments: to allow for or to exclude “odd” combinations of attribute levels in the randomized conjoint profiles shown to respondents (such as a profile of a Democratic candidate who does not support abortion rights or an individual who is a medical doctor but does not have a graduate degree). While previous work has studied the statistical and theoretical implications of this decision, there…
Political science (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Mathematics (7 works) · Statistics (7 works) · Econometrics (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (4 works) · Conjoint analysis (4 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (4 works)