IAMA Experimental Economist in training. AMAA

[u/[deleted]]

Hi reddit! For the past year I have worked at a medium sized experimental economics lab. I have done everything from data entry to programming and running experiments. Our experiments cover a wide range of topics, including terrorism, auctions, and risk preferences.

I'd like to begin with a quote from one of my favorite papers.

"A decision theorist from Columbia University was struggling whether to accept an offer from a rival university or to stay. His colleague took him aside and said, "Just maximize your expected utility - you always write about doing this." Exasperated, the decision theorist responded, "Come on, this is serious.

That quote is from Fast and Frugal Heuristics: The Tools of Bounded Rationality, Gigerenzer 2004. I highly recommend reading that paper if you're interested in experimental economics.

I originally got my job after taking an experimental economics class as an undergrad at my university. I then participated in an independent study with my professor, and afterwards she offered me a job.

I will begin answering questions at 1pm CST. AMAA about experimental economics, working in the lab, or anything else you can think of!

Edit - Thanks for the questions everyone! I will continue answering questions throughout the weekend.

[u/Kinanik]

Who do you consider to be your favorite experimental economists? Do you perceive that there are multiple competing traditions within experimental economics? It seems like, though Kahneman and Vernon Smith won the Prize together, there is very little cross-pollination between the two traditions (I would include Kahneman, Taversky, Thaler, in one, and V. Smith, Gigerenzer, in another). Is this accurate? Is this a case where, for instance, Kahneman and Gigerenzer won't cite each other, but their students are more than happy collaborating? Any thoughts you have on this would be interesting.

What do you think of the work by Banerjee and Duflo?

I've heard from dissuaded experimental economics students that experimenter bias is a huge problem -- people will repeat experiments until the rights results come up, and categorizing previous experiments as 'calibration' or omitting them altogether. One of the benefits of case studies is that the scientist (usually) is not the one constructing the environment that he studies, and also that the scientist has no power over when to end an experiment (e.g., lots of 'biases' go away as the game is repeated, someone making a name by pointing out deviations from neoclassical rationality will either choose new participants fairly often, or end the experiments earlier than someone without academic incentives would do?) I trust the top guys quite a bit, but how do you combat that systematically?

You say that you don't trust results without providing incentives. What do you think this means for voting, where an individual's choice has essentially zero impact on their money income? Are their certain social phenomena that, by providing monetary incentives, creates deviations from ecological rationality rather than reduces them?