Copenhagen, Denmark

Behavioral and Experimental Economics

when 29 July 2024 - 16 August 2024
language English
duration 3 weeks
credits 7.5 EC
fee DKK 2625

Behavioral economics attempts to make economics a more relevant and powerful science of human behavior by integrating insights from psychology and the social sciences into economics. Experimental economics adapts methods developed in the natural sciences to study economic behavior. Experiments are valuable in testing to what extent the integration of insights from other disciplines into economics is necessary and fruitful. Behavioral and Experimental Economics is a vibrant field of research in economics and sheds new light on many old and important issues in economics. The field has received wide recognition in recent years, for example by the award of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2002 to Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith. The field is rapidly growing. This course can therefore not provide a comprehensive overview but concentrates on selected topics instead.

The course addresses the following questions: What are the advantages and limitations of experimental economics? How important are deviations from the assumptions of full rationality and strict self-interest in determining outcomes of economic interaction? It is argued that identifying individual-level “anomalies” is not sufficient to demonstrate their economic and social importance. Instead, it must be analyzed how institutions mitigate and multiply these anomalies. A broad range of institutions, including markets, bargaining and voting is discussed.

Course leader

Jean-Robert Karl Tyran

Target group

Bachelor/Master

Course aim

After completing the course, the student should be able to:

Knowledge:

•Know how the toolbox of experimental economics can be used in research. They know how economic theory can be confronted with experimental data.


•Participate in a series of demonstration experiments and therefore learn how experiments work in practice from the participants’ perspective.


•Learn in what ways people systematically deviate from rational and self-interested behavior in individual decision making.


•Learn in what ways markets and other forms of economic interaction can multiply or mitigate these biases. This knowledge is most relevant in the context of institutional choice or design (e.g. from an economic policy perspective).


•Participate in a series of demonstration experiments and therefore learn how experiments work in practice from the participants’ perspective.


Skills:

•Become critical consumers of the rapidly growing behavioral and experimental economics literature.


•Recognize and avoide pitfalls in decision-making.


•Write short papers to analyze experimental data and to reflect on the data and the experimental design. Students therefore improve their writing and reasoning skills.


Competencies:

•Gain a deeper understanding of the basic principles of rationality and self-interest in economics. Students are therefore able to critically reflect the conventional wisdom in economics.

Fee info

DKK 2625: EU/EEA citizens

You do not pay tution fee if you are enrolled in a Danish University and have a preapproval for credit transfer.
EUR 1275: Non-EU/EEA citizens