Hanming Fang
Hanming Fang is the Class of 1965 Term Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and the third author of the 2009 American Economic Review paper, with Hongbin Cai and Yuyu Chen, that tested social proof on restaurant tables in Beijing. His own research is mostly in insurance markets, health care and the economics of discrimination.
Who they are
Fang is an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, named Class of 1965 Term Professor of Economics in Penn Arts and Sciences. The announcement lists his research areas as public economics, applied microeconomic theory and empirical microeconomics, with work on the economics of discrimination, on life and health insurance markets, and on health care, including Medicare.
In 2008 he received the Kenneth Arrow Prize from the International Health Economics Association for research on advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market. He has been co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics and of the International Economic Review, and associate editor of several journals, the American Economic Review among them. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he was acting director of the Chinese economy working group from 2014 to 2016, and a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at Penn.
When the restaurant paper appeared, the journal record placed him at Duke University, with Cai and Chen at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University.
Key papers
Cai, Chen and Fang (2009), Observational Learning: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Field Experiment, American Economic Review 99(3), 864-882, doi:10.1257/aer.99.3.864. A randomised field experiment in a restaurant, built to tell observational learning apart from saliency. Showing diners the five most popular dishes raised demand for them by about 13 to 20 per cent. Showing only the names of sample dishes had no significant effect. The effect was modestly stronger among infrequent customers, and satisfaction rose with the ranking and not with the names alone.
His work on insurance markets, the subject of the 2008 prize, is outside what the article that cites him covers, and this page does not summarise it.
Key ideas
The paper asks whether following the crowd is observational learning, meaning that the crowd's choices carry information a diner does not have. Its design included an arm in which diners saw only the names of sample dishes, to separate learning from attention.
Sources
- Cai, H., Chen, Y., & Fang, H. (2009). "Observational Learning: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Field Experiment." American Economic Review, 99(3), 864-882. doi:10.1257/aer.99.3.864. Author order and affiliations at the time of publication from the journal record.
- University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, announcement naming Hanming Fang Class of 1965 Term Professor of Economics: research areas, the 2008 Kenneth Arrow Prize, editorial roles and affiliations.