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/EBER Seminar: Rafael Jimenez-Duran (Stanford)
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are said to exhibit sycophancy, a tendency to agree with users irrespective of the truth. We propose an economic framework that defines sycophancy as a preference for user approval, and develop an outcome-based sufficient statistic to detect it. Our identification strategy exploits a key architectural feature of LLMs: they are stateless, and "memory" of past interactions is constructed by summarizing conversations into short profiles appended to each new prompt. Because this memory can be controlled, toggled, and varied experimentally, we can isolate the causal path from user feedback to sycophantic behavior. We instrument the LLM's perceived cost of disagreement with a one-word variation in simulated prior user feedback. In an experiment with leading LLMs across three domains (moral judgments, factual questions, and common misconceptions) we find evidence that LLMs are sycophantic. Sycophancy is larger in subjective domains where baseline accuracy is lower and is heterogeneous across models.