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:
Research Students
Events
DR@W Forum: Ferdinand Vieider (Ghent)
Standard models of decision-making capture regularities in risk-taking and delay-discounting by applying subjective transformations to objective choice primitives.
Such subjective transformations are typically thought of as capturing stable ‘preferences’. In a stark departure from the standard approach, noisy cognition models represent behavior as the outgrowth of optimal reactions to noisy perceptions and re-combinations of choice primitives. Here, we test the predictions of the two model classes against each other by systematically varying presentation formats of identical choice primitives in ways we expect to affect cognitive noise. The results illustrate that behavioral regularities such as insensitivity to probabilities and to time delays can be systematically shifted and even reversed by subtle alterations in the presentation of identical choice tasks. Canonical patterns such as risk aversion increasing in stakes and delay-discounting declining in stakes obtain when transparently changing the numerical units in which rewards are expressed while keeping the underlying stakes constant. These results appear puzzling from the perspective of standard models. They do, however, precisely track the predictions emerging from noisy cognition models. The results illustrate the generative and hence causal meaning of noisy cognition parameters, which provide a stylized representation of information processing by the brain. The implication is that treating choices as dissociated from physical processes in the brain, as advocated in standard economics, risks overlooking the key to understanding — and ultimately predicting — behavior.