Experimental and Behavioural Economics
Experimental and Behavioural Economics
The Experimental and Behavioural Economics Research Group (EBERG) draws its membership from economists based at the Economics Department at Warwick who work in the fields of Experimental Economics, Behavioural Economics and/or Subjective Wellbeing (“Happiness Economics”). Experimental methods are used in many fields of economics, including behavioural economics, public economics, labour economics, political economy, game theory, and financial economics. Behavioural economics is an attempt to understand decision-making in the context of the many psychological, cognitive and emotional factors that influence behaviour. Behavioural economists typically build on traditional economic models with insights from psychology or neuroscience. Since behavioural economics concerns the underlying motivations for behaviour it can be hard (though not impossible) to find data to support or develop behavioural theories without the use of experimental methods which explains the close relationship between the two fields.
Experimental and behavioural research are fundamentally interdisciplinary and this is reflected in the fact that the group is linked to other similar groups across the University of Warwick and beyond. DR@W is the overarching interdisciplinary group of all behavioural scientists in Warwick which, together with EBERG, also takes members from the Behavioural Science Group at Warwick Business School and behavioural and experimental psychologists based in the Psychology Department, and hosts a weekly seminar, the DR@W Forum. Many members of EBERG are also affiliated with Bridges, an interdisciplinary centre that includes behavioural and experimental work in its remit that also hosts regular seminars and workshops. Behaviour, Brain and Society is one of the University of Warwick’s global research priorities (GRPs) and the co-ordinator of EBERG sits on the board of the GRP. Several group members are actively involved in the ESRC CAGE centre. Theme 3 of CAGE is led by the co-ordinator of EBERG and has a special focus on subjective wellbeing.
People
Academics
Academics associated with the Reseach Group Name research group are:
Events
DR@W Forum: Neil Bramley (Edinburgh)
Humans form rich causal models of the world that support prediction, explanation, planning and control. While Bayesian methods help formalize how such representations can be learned from data, they are only tractable in the simplest cases. Thus, a key question is how bounded human learners succeed in the face of the world’s formidable complexity. I will discuss a project aimed at unravelling this mystery. We investigate how people learn about probabilistic causal systems by performing interventions (actions that perturb a system of interest, like pushing a button, taking a medicine, or implementing a policy). Across a line of studies and extensive model comparison, I show that people adjust their causal representations in a piecemeal fashion, making small local changes rather than more extensive “Kuhnian” revisions. I formalize this with a model inspired by algorithms for approximating Bayesian inference, and use this model to explain how bounded learners can find high probability hypotheses even in complex learning domains. If there is time, I’ll mention several ways we are extending these ideas this to capture other aspects of human learning.
Key paper: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-08702-001
Recent extension to concept learning: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010028522000421
And incorporation of bootstrapping: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01719-1