Behavioural and Experimental Economics

Behavioral and Experimental Economics is increasingly becoming a more and more prominent field in economics and social science in general. This is illustrated by the fact that the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, 2009, and 2012 was awarded for contributions to Behavioral and Experimental Economics. The findings of Behavioral and Experimental Economics is now so robust and respected, that governments, firms, and other organizations in great numbers actively apply the insights from this field. The methodology of Behavioral and Experimental Economics is to revise the standard economic models of human behavior by integrating psychological, sociological, and neuroscience research in to the economic science.

As a student completing this course you will learn two major objectives:

1) Understand what behavioral and experimental economics (BEE) is. Through a series of topics it will be exemplified to you how BEE can be used to study central elements of human decision making. To obtain this insight several activities are initiated: A) You read about behavioral economic theories/concepts and how previous experiments test how people actually behavior in such situations. B) You participate yourself in experiments C) You analyze behavior from class experiments you participated in. D) You engage actively in lectures and classroom discussions.

2) The second major objective that you will learn in this course is to set up experiments yourself. By applying a hand-on approach to economic experiments you will understand what it in practice means to conduct experiments and this will allow you to reflect on the limitations and possibilities of this method. Not least, the required knowledge enables you to be a critical consumer of economic experiments done by others, which is a key (and lacking) skill when applying BEE results in real life. Your learning of the experimental method is facilitated in several ways: A) You act as experimenter in several class-demonstration experiments B) In groups, you develop own experimental designs and carry it out in practice. C) You learn about experimental designs in lectures and through discussions of designs applied in research papers.

On top of the two main objectives, you will get inputs as to how academic papers can be read efficiently and how to remain critical and reflective to the conclusions drawn on experimental work.

What you learn in the course will be evaluated in two ways.

1) You will be engaged in a block project, in which you set up your own experiment together with a group of other students. This project will allow you to demonstrate that you are able to handle the full academic process of running an experiment all the way from formulating an interesting research idea, review existing knowledge, carefully designing and performing an experiment to test the research idea, and finally analyze and discuss the findings.

2) At the very end of the course you will be asked to complete a more traditional written exam of 2 hours. Here one topic from the course will be selected, and you are asked to explain how the BEE literature has approached this topic and what the main findings are, and comment on possible class-experiment(s) related to this topic.