Scott Lee Chua 🇵🇭

I am interested in economics, a field whose definition is still in flux. I currently define it as the study of human relations in, around, and despite modern capitalist systems [see changelog]. This philosophy informs my work, research, and creative writing.

In 2022, I obtained a masters degree in Quantitative Economics from the National University of Singapore. I previously graduated summa cum laude from Yale-NUS College, where I grew to love mathematics, statistics, and barbershop singing.

In 2017, I created a fantasy/sci-fi graphic novel called Doorkeeper together with Ethan Chua and a team of fantastic Filipino artists — read it here.

At present, I design board games with Mosquito Games, write for video games with Andas Productions, and chip away at a new graphic novel.

news [archive]

Jul 2022	I ran a workshop on reading and writing for a wonderful bunch of primary school students at the Scholastic Readers Camp!
Apr 2022	My paper on lying behavior with Jessica Chang and Guillem Riambau has been published in the Journal of Economic Psychology.
Feb 2022	I just concluded a three-day virtual workshop with Queena Lee-Chua (my mother!) on Singapore math and the model method, for over 20,000 teachers across the Philippines.
Jun 2021	I presented my paper on trust and darknet markets at WEIS 2021.
Feb 2021	I ran a workshop on sequential storytelling at the Yale-NUS College Writers’ Centre Comics and Zines Fest!

papers

Cybercrime

Measuring the deterioration of trust on the dark web: Evidence from Operation Bayonet

Chua, S.L.

20th Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (2021)
Yale-NUS Outstanding Capstone in Economics (2020)

Abstract PDF Slides Video

How can we measure trust on illicit darknet market websites? Borrowing from the industrial organization literature, I propose a new empirical strategy that uses vendors’ return on reputation as a proxy for trust. I use this strategy to quantify the deterioration of trust on the Dream darknet market in response to Operation Bayonet, a law enforcement operation. I tease apart the effects of the operation’s first stage, a conventional market takedown, and its second stage, an impersonation campaign. I find that the latter significantly erodes marketplace trust while the former does not. This decrease in trust manifests as an increase in vendors’ returns on reputation. I estimate Operation Bayonet to have increased the difference in mean revenue between a 5-star and a 4-star vendor by 32.5 percentage points. I further find that deterioration in buyer trust concentrates darknet sales in the hands of fewer vendors, raising the barriers to entry and increasing the effectiveness of future anti-vendor law enforcement operations.
Dishonesty

Lying behavior when the payoffs are shared with charity: Experimental evidence

Chua, S.L., Chang, J., and Riambau, G.

Journal of Economic Psychology (2022)

Abstract PDF Slides Code

We investigate lying behavior when lying is undetectable and payoffs are split with charity. 524 participants roll a die in private, report the outcome, and receive the monetary equivalent of their reported number, i.e., there is a clear incentive to lie. Participants are randomly assigned to share all, some, or none of this payoff with a charity of their choice. This allows us to examine how lying behavior changes with the share of payoffs going to charity. Our results are as follows: (i) there are participants in every group who lie to inflate their reported number; (ii) participants with no share of the payoff lie much less than participants with some share, no matter how small; and (iii) post-experiment surveys reveal that participants who keep the whole payoff are much less likely to admit to having cheated than all other participants. Finally, our data suggests that lying is not correlated with any observable sociodemographic characteristic.
Education

Do grades enhance learning? Evidence from a natural experiment in a liberal arts college

Chua, S.L., Riambau, G., and Wertz, T.

In progress

Abstract PDF

We examine how grades affect students’ learning using data from a liberal arts college in Singapore. We examine a natural experiment where, in 2017, the grading policy for an introductory statistics module was exogenously changed from letter grade to pass/fail, but the content, format, difficulty, and modes of assessment remained exactly the same. Our dataset includes all results from individual twice-weekly quizzes and two exams for five cohorts: three under letter-grade and two under pass/fail. Our results show that pass/fail students initially work as hard as letter-graded students, but tend to lower their effort as the course goes on, with a sharp decrease right after the first exam. This suggests that, as soon as students realize they have secured a "pass", they choose to allocate their time and effort to other subjects or activities. We further find that intending to major closely related to the subject does not explain relatively better performance under a pass/fail scheme. Our results suggest that pass/fail policies could safely be implemented more extensively: the loss in acquired knowledge is marginal and could easily be compensated in terms of personal time and mental health.