| Course Description |
A PhD course on experimental economics will cover various topics that have been
explored using experimental economics including: other regarding preferences,
charitable giving, public goods, individual decision making, cognitive limitations,
motivated reasoning, market design, and gender. While the instructor will expose
students to high-quality experimental work across these topics, the main focus of the
class will be on experimental methodology to give students insight into how they can run
their own experiments on these and other topics. Additional course lectures will cover:
the history of experimental economics, preference elicitation strategies, large scale
RCTs, nudges, and partnering with organizations for research. Finally, the course will
cover debates in experimental economics including those surrounding lab vs. field
experiments, subject populations, and replication. The course is geared towards getting
PhD students to actually start producing their own experimental research. Students will
be asked to produce two short assignments: one proposing a lab experiment and one
proposing a field experiment. In addition, the final project for the course will ask
students to write up a longer proposal for an experiment the student might actually
consider running and to prepare a slide deck about the proposed project. The final
lecture of the course will have students present their proposed designs, allowing
students to receive feedback from their classmates.
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