A natural experiment is an empirical study in which individuals are exposed to the experimental and control conditions that are determined by nature or by other factors outside the control of the investigators. The process governing the exposures arguably resembles random assignment. Thus, natural experiments are observational studies and are not controlled in the traditional sense of a randomized experiment. Natural experiments are most useful when there has been a clearly defined exposure involving a well defined subpopulation such that changes in outcomes may be plausibly attributed to the exposure. In this sense, the difference between a natural experiment and a non-experimental observational study is that the former includes a comparison of conditions that pave the way for causal inference, but the latter does not.
Vernon Lomax Smith is an American economist and professor of business economics and law at Chapman University. He was formerly a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. Along with Daniel Kahneman, Smith shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and his work in the field of experimental economics. He worked to establish 'laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms'.
Behavioral economics studies the effects of psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors on the decisions of individuals or institutions, such as how those decisions vary from those implied by classical economic theory.
Managerial economics is a branch of economics involving the application of economic methods in the organizational decision-making process. Economics is the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Managerial economics involves the use of economic theories and principles to make decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources.
Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to study economic questions. Data collected in experiments are used to estimate effect size, test the validity of economic theories, and illuminate market mechanisms. Economic experiments usually use cash to motivate subjects, in order to mimic real-world incentives. Experiments are used to help understand how and why markets and other exchange systems function as they do. Experimental economics have also expanded to understand institutions and the law.
The public goods game is a standard of experimental economics. In the basic game, subjects secretly choose how many of their private tokens to put into a public pot. The tokens in this pot are multiplied by a factor and this "public good" payoff is evenly divided among players. Each subject also keeps the tokens they do not contribute.
John August List is an American economist known for establishing field experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis. He works at the University of Chicago, where he serves as Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor; from 2012 until 2018, he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics. Since 2016, he has served as Visiting Robert F. Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. List is noted for his pioneering contributions to field experiments in economics, with Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof and noted law professor Cass Sunstein writing that "List has done more than anyone else to advance the methods and practice of field experiments." Nobel prize winning economist Gary Becker quipped that "John List's work in field experiments is revolutionary."
The goals of experimental finance are to understand human and market behavior in settings relevant to finance. Experiments are synthetic economic environments created by researchers specifically to answer research questions. This might involve, for example, establishing different market settings and environments to observe experimentally and analyze agents' behavior and the resulting characteristics of trading flows, information diffusion and aggregation, price setting mechanism and returns processes.
A web-based experiment or Internet-based experiment is an experiment that is conducted over the Internet. In such experiments, the Internet is either "a medium through which to target larger and more diverse samples with reduced administrative and financial costs" or "a field of social science research in its own right." Psychology and Internet studies are probably the disciplines that have used these experiments most widely, although a range of other disciplines including political science and economics also use web-based experiments. Within psychology most web-based experiments are conducted in the areas of cognitive psychology and social psychology. This form of experimental setup has become increasingly popular because researchers can cheaply collect large amounts of data from a wider range of locations and people. A web-based experiment is a type of online research method. Web based experiments have become significantly more widespread since the COVID-19 pandemic, as researchers have been unable to conduct lab-based experiments.
Cultural economics is the branch of economics that studies the relation of culture to economic outcomes. Here, 'culture' is defined by shared beliefs and preferences of respective groups. Programmatic issues include whether and how much culture matters as to economic outcomes and what its relation is to institutions. As a growing field in behavioral economics, the role of culture in economic behavior is increasingly being demonstrated to cause significant differentials in decision-making and the management and valuation of assets.
Joshua David Angrist is an Israeli-American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angrist, together with Guido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021 "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".
Alvin Eliot Roth is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. He was President of the American Economics Association in 2017.
The George Washington University School of Business is the professional business school of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The GW School of Business is ranked as one of the top business schools in the United States, with globally ranked undergraduate and graduate programs. GW's campus is also adjacent to some of the world's leading financial institutions, including the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.
Olivia S. Mitchell is an American economist and the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests focus on pensions and social security, and she is the executive director of the Pension Research Council, the oldest U.S. center devoted to scholarship and policy-relevant research on retirement security. She also heads Wharton's Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research.
Uri Hezkia Gneezy is the Epstein/Atkinson Endowed Chair in Behavioral Economics and Professor of Economics & Strategy at the University of California, San Diego's Rady School of Management.
Annamaria Lusardi is an Italian-born economist and the Denit Trust Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Economics and Accountancy at The George Washington University School of Business. In 2011 she founded and continues to serve as the Academic Director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center. Her interests focus on financial literacy and financial education.
Gary Charness is Professor of Economics and the Director of the Experimental and Behavioral Economics Laboratory in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Charness is an economist and social scientist, specializing in experimental and behavioral work; he is currently ranked 3rd in the world by RePEc in the field of experimental economics and has published nearly 80 academic articles. Charness is a contributor to several areas of economic research, including social preferences, identity and group membership, communication and beliefs, behavioral interventions, group decision-making, social networks, gender, and individual decision-making. A centerpiece of his research has been to effect beneficial social outcomes in difficult economic environments. Charness's work has been discussed and published in The New York Times and Science, as well as in other media. Charness is married and has three children.
Bridget Terry Long is the 12th Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Saris Professor of Education and Economics. She is an economist whose research focuses on college access and success. Long is a Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Academy of Education.
Jere Richard Behrman is an American economist and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He belongs to the world's most prominent development and education economists and human capital scholars, with a strong focus on Central and South America.
Georg Heinrich von Weizsäcker is a German economist and currently the Professor for Microeconomic Theory and Applications at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research interests include microeconomics, experimental economics, financial decision making, game theory and decision theory. In 2017, Weizsäcker's contributions to a better understanding of expectations formation and decisions under uncertainty were awarded the Gossen Prize.
