Publications by Author: Mayya Komisarchik

Conjoint survey designs are spreading across the social sciences due to their unusual capacity to estimate many causal effects from a single randomized experiment. Unfortunately, by their ability to mirror complicated real-world choices, these designs often generate substantial measurement error and thus bias. We replicate both the data collection and analysis from eight prominent conjoint studies, all of which closely reproduce published results, and show that a large proportion of observed variation in answers to conjoint questions is effectively random noise. We then discover a common empirical pattern in how measurement error appears in conjoint studies and, with it, introduce an easy-to-use statistical method to correct the bias.

You may be interested in software (in progress) that implements all the suggestions in our paper: "Projoint: The One-Stop Conjoint Shop".

To deter gerrymandering, many state constitutions require legislative districts to be "compact." Yet, the law offers few precise definitions other than "you know it when you see it," which effectively implies a common understanding of the concept. In contrast, academics have shown that compactness has multiple dimensions and have generated many conflicting measures. We hypothesize that both are correct -- that compactness is complex and multidimensional, but a common understanding exists across people. We develop a survey to elicit this understanding, with high reliability (in data where the standard paired comparisons approach fails). We create a statistical model that predicts, with high accuracy, solely from the geometric features of the district, compactness evaluations by judges and public officials responsible for redistricting, among others. We also offer compactness data from our validated measure for 20,160 state legislative and congressional districts, as well as open source software to compute this measure from any district.

Winner of the 2018 Robert H Durr Award from the MPSA.

This software implements the method described in Aaron Kaufman, Gary King, and Mayya Komisarchik. Forthcoming. “How to Measure Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See It.” American Journal of Political Science. Copy at http://j.mp/2u9OWrG 

Our paper abstract:  To deter gerrymandering, many state constitutions require legislative districts to be "compact." Yet, the law offers few precise definitions other than "you know it when you see it," which effectively implies a common understanding of the concept. In contrast, academics have shown that compactness has multiple dimensions and have generated many conflicting measures. We hypothesize that both are correct -- that compactness is complex and multidimensional, but a common understanding exists across people. We develop a survey to elicit this understanding, with high reliability (in data where the standard paired comparisons approach fails). We create a statistical model that predicts, with high accuracy, solely from the geometric features of the district, compactness evaluations by judges and public officials responsible for redistricting, among others. We also offer compactness data from our validated measure for 20,160 state legislative and congressional districts, as well as software to compute this measure from any district.
 

Information hierarchies are difficult to express when real-world space or time constraints force traversing the hierarchy in linear presentations, such as in educational books and classroom courses. We present booc.io, which allows linear and non-linear presentation and navigation of educational concepts and material. To support a breadth of material for each concept, booc.io is Web based, which allows adding material such as lecture slides, book chapters, videos, and LTIs. A visual interface assists the creation of the needed hierarchical structures. The goals of our system were formed in expert interviews, and we explain how our design meets these goals. We adapt a real-world course into booc.io, and perform introductory qualitative evaluation with students.