Gary
Charness
(charness@econ.ucsb.edu)
Fall 2009
Course Number: Econ 276
Time: Tuesdays and
Thursdays from
Location: 2816 Ellison Hall
Office Hours: Tuesday 12:30 -
Course webpage:
http:/www.econ.ucsb.edu/~charness/econ276_fall_2009/index.html
Introduction:
This is a
course in experimental economics. The purpose of the course is to
introduce
students to the idea that economics
can be a
laboratory science and to familiarize you with the techniques used to
design and execute successful experiments. This course may be
used as part of a field in behavioral economics. I intend this
course to show people how they might use the experimental approach with
their research, in a hands-on manner.
There will be assigned readings
for most or all classes; I will generally e-mail these to you. We
will discuss the readings and the designs and ideas in these papers.
Some of the experimental areas we will cover include (behavioral) game
theory, labor experiments, cooperation and social preferences,
risk and decision-making, the winner's curse, and individual
decision-making.
We will do some simple experiments in class and will most likely have
some experiments scheduled in conjunction with my undergraduate class
in game theory. You will have an opportunity to participate in
regular paid expeirments if you wish and/or to observe/help with
experiments as they are conducted during the spring quarter.
You
should get an appreciation
of experiments as a way to enrich your research. You will
be exposed
to the basic
material and you will study more intensively papers in your area of
research interest. I am a full-time experimentalist, with almost
all of my research done using experimental methods. The
emphasis will be individually-tailored, depending on the interests of
the students. I will meet
with you individually to discuss how one might go about designing
experiments that address the key questions in your area of interest,
and you will design an experiment in your area; I think a particularly
useful discipline is to design an experiment to test a theory or
model. You will also be
responsible for writing a survey paper, which discusses perhaps five
papers
in a field of your choice and which also distills the essential issues
in this area and suggests an experimental research strategy to get at
these issues.