behavioral and experimental economics

A Taxonomy of AI Experiments

We introduce a taxonomy of artificial intelligence (AI) experiments. Our taxonomy produces four types of AI experiments: conceptual AI experiments, stylized AI experiments, quasi-natural AI experiments, and natural AI experiments. At the core of our …

The Economics of Babysitting a Robot

I theoretically propose and experimentally test a novel behavioral channel, robot-babysitting, that can impose switching and learning costs on workers when automation is complementary. My theoretical model shows that one can identify these costs by …

The (Statistical) Power of Incentives

I study an optimal design of monetary incentives in experiments where incentives are a treatment variable. I introduce the Budget Minimization problem in which a researcher chooses the level of incentives that allows her to detect a predicted …

Deciphering the Noise: The Welfare Costs of Noisy Behavior

Theoretical work on stochastic choice mainly focuses on the sources of choice randomness, and less on its economic consequences. We close this gap by developing a method of extracting information about the costs of noise from structural estimates of …

Experiments on the Fly

How do exogenous increases in resources to a government affect its expenditure decisions? Economic theory typically predicts that a lump-sum grant will have the same impact on government expenditures as an increase in income. However, empirical …

Give Me a Challenge or Give Me a Raise

I study the effect of task difficulty on workers’ effort. I find that task difficulty has an inverse-U effect on effort and that this effect is quantitatively large, especially when compared to the effect of conditional monetary rewards. Difficulty …

Selection in the Lab: A Network Approach

We study the dynamics of the selection problem in economic experiments. We show that adding dynamics significantly complicates the effect of the selection problem on external validity and can explain some contradictory results in the literature. We …

Using Response Times to Measure Ability on a Cognitive Task

I show how using response times as a proxy for effort can address a long-standing issue of how to separate the effect of cognitive ability on performance from the effect of motivation. My method is based on a dynamic stochastic model of optimal …

Experimental Methods: When and Why Contextual Instructions Are Important

An important methodological issue in experimental research is the extent to which one should use context-rich or abstract language in the instructions for an experiment. The traditional use of abstract context in experimental economics is commonly …