At the Experimental Lab at the Vancouver School of Economics (ELVSE), researchers in economics and the social sciences can study decision-making in a controlled setting.
Our computer lab consists of 24 workstations connected over a local network. ELVSE conducts internet-based experiments as well, and we often conduct experiments in other locations on campus.
Experimental Economics
Experimental economics uses experimental methods to find answers to social science questions challenging to answer using theory or field data. As in natural sciences, lab experiments allow researchers to study specific problems in a controlled environment.
Researchers at ELVSE may conduct experiments in the field or online. Unlike some experiments in psychology or other disciplines, participants in economics experiments are paid based on their performance. Furthermore, researchers will never deceive subjects during an experiment conducted at ELVSE.
In most of the experiments, participants are undergraduate students. Researchers usually design experiments under the assumption that participants do not have any specific knowledge of economics or math. Any UBC undergraduate student can join the pool of subjects that are invited to participate in experiments.
ELVSE Research
- David Freeman, Yoram Halevy and Terri Kneeland, "Eliciting Risk Preferences using Choice Lists," Quantitative Economics (2019).
- Larry Epstein and Yoram Halevy, "Ambiguous Correlation," Review of Economic Studies (2019)
- Yoram Halevy, Dotan Persitz and Lanny Zrill, "Parametric Recoverability of Preferences," Journal of Political Economy (2018).
- Anujit Chakraborty, Evan Calford, Guidon Feng and Yoram Halevy, "External and Internal Consistency of Choices Made in Convex Time Budgets," Experimental Economics (2017).
- Evan Calford and Ryan Oprea, "Continuity, Inertia and Strategic Uncertainty: A Test of the Theory of Continuous Time Games," Econometrica (2017).
- Michael Muthukrishna, Patrick Francois, Shayan Pourahmadi and Joseph Henrich, "Corrupting cooperation and how anti-corruption strategies may backfire," Nature Human Behaviour (2017).
- Guidon Fenig and Luba Petersen, "Distributing Scarce Jobs and Output: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Rationing," Experimental Economics (2017).
- Terri Kneeland, "Identifying High-Order Rationality," Econometrica (2015).
- Yoram Halevy, "Time Consistency: Stationarity and Time Invariance," Econometrica (2015).
- Evan Calford, "Ambiguity Aversion in Game Theory: Experimental Evidence" (2015).
- Anujit Chakraborty, "If tomorrow comes: An investigation into finitely repeated prisoner's dilemma when the future is uncertain" (2017).
- Guidon Fenig, Giovanni Gallipoli, and Yoram Halevy, “Complementarity in the Private Provision of Public Goods by Homo Pecuniarius and Homo Behavioralis” (2016).
- Guidon Fenig, Giovanni Gallipoli, and Yoram Halevy, "The Race to the Bottom in the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism with Complementarity (VCMC)" (2015).
- Guidon Fenig, Mariya Mileva and Luba Petersen, "Asset Trading and Monetary Policy in Production Economies" (2015).
- Yoram Halevy and Michael Peters, "Behavioral Bargaining" (2017).
- Chad Kendall, "Market Panics, Frenzies, and Informational Efficiency: Theory and Experiment" (2017).
ELVSE People
- Evan Calford, Australian National University, Research School of Economics
- Anujit Chakraborty, University of California – Davis, Department of Economics
- Guidon Fenig, University of Ottawa, Department of Economics
- David Freeman, Simon Fraser University, Department of Economics
- Yoram Halevy, University of Toronto, Department of Economics
- Joe Henrich, Harvard University, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
- Chad Kendall, University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business
- Terri Kneeland, University College London, Department of Economics
- Michael Muthukrishna, London School of Economics, Department of Psychological and Behavioural Sciences
- Ryan Oprea, University of California – Santa Barbara, Department of Economics
- Chloe Tergiman, PennState Smeal College of Business
- Lanny Zrill, HEC Montreal, Department of Applied Economics
Contact
Our lab is located in Room 003 in Iona Building, on UBC Point Grey campus.
To get to our lab, go to the basement floor of Iona.
Please note that some of our experiments are not conducted in the lab. Please follow the specific invitation you received.