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: Tomáš Jagelka (Bonn)
Compensating wage differentials that employees demand for doing a particular job depend on the job’s characteristics. Via a series of experiments, we seek to demonstrate that compensating wage differentials can be predicted by individuals’ subjective time perceptions: the shorter participants perceive time spent on a task to be relative to objective time -- the subjective/objective time ratio, or “SOT” -- the lower is the wage that they demand for that task and the more productive they are at performing the task. By varying task enjoyment exogenously within-subject while holding all other task characteristics constant, we aim to establish that task enjoyment causes the variation in SOT and compensating wage differentials. We interpret this as evidence that SOT constitutes an objective measure of non-pecuniary utility derived from a task. We anticipate that SOT correlates with self-reported task enjoyment and predicts compensating differentials better than self-reports. This would suggest that SOT captures components of wage demands that are not readily accessible by conscious introspection. Importantly, because the passage of time has a well-defined objective scale, unlike self-reported task enjoyment, it is not impacted by scale use differences between respondents. Our work establishes subjective time measurements as a novel indicator relevant to economists and psychologists, which provides an alternative way for measuring preferences and enriches our understanding of task utility.