A natural experiment is a 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 who is currently a professor of economics and law at Chapman University. He was formerly the McLellan/Regent’s Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, a professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. Along with Daniel Kahneman, Smith won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and his work in the field of experimental economics, which helped establish “laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms”.
Behavioral economics is the study of the psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors involved in the decisions of individuals or institutions, and how these decisions deviate 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. It guides managers in making decisions relating to the company's customers, competitors, suppliers, and internal operations.
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.
Richard H. Thaler is an American economist and the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2015, Thaler was president of the American Economic Association.
The Mitch Daniels School of Business is the school of business at Purdue University, a public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana. It offers instruction at the undergraduate, master's, and doctoral levels.
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 his work in establishing field experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis. Since 2016, he has served as the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he was Chairman of the Department of Economics from 2012 to 2018. Since 2016, he has also served as Visiting Robert F. Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. In 2011, List was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
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 Economic Association in 2017.
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.
Social preferences describe the human tendency to not only care about one's own material payoff, but also the reference group's payoff or/and the intention that leads to the payoff. Social preferences are studied extensively in behavioral and experimental economics and social psychology. Types of social preferences include altruism, fairness, reciprocity, and inequity aversion. The field of economics originally assumed that humans were rational economic actors, and as it became apparent that this was not the case, the field began to change. The research of social preferences in economics started with lab experiments in 1980, where experimental economists found subjects' behavior deviated systematically from self-interest behavior in economic games such as ultimatum game and dictator game. These experimental findings then inspired various new economic models to characterize agent's altruism, fairness and reciprocity concern between 1990 and 2010. More recently, there are growing amounts of field experiments that study the shaping of social preference and its applications throughout society.
Eldar Shafir is an American behavioral scientist, and the co-author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. He is the Class of 1987 Professor in Behavioral Science and Public Policy; Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University Department of Psychology and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and Inaugural Director of Princeton’s Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy.
Uri Hezkia Gneezy is an Israeli-American behavioral economist, known for his work on incentives. He currently holds the Epstein/Atkinson Endowed Chair in Behavioral Economics at the University of California, San Diego's Rady School of Management. He is also a visiting research professor at the University of Amsterdam and NHH in Bergen.
Marianne Bertrand is a Belgian economist who currently works as Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Willard Graham Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Bertrand belongs to the world's most prominent labour economists in terms of research, and has been awarded the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize and the 2012 Sherwin Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Labor Economics. She is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.
Annamaria Lusardi is an Italian-born economist and the Denit Trust Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Economics and Accountancy at Stanford 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.
Erica Marie Field is an economist who currently works as a James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of economics at Duke University. Her research interests include development economics, labour economics, and health economics. In 2010, her research was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize.
Bridget Terry Long is an American economist is the 12th Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Saris Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard University. 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.
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.
The gift-exchange game, also commonly known as the gift exchange dilemma, is a common economic game introduced by George Akerlof and Janet Yellen to model reciprocacy in labor relations. The gift-exchange game simulates a labor-management relationship execution problem in the principal-agent problem in labor economics. The simplest form of the game involves two players – an employee and an employer. The employer first decides whether they should award a higher salary to the employee. The employee then decides whether to reciprocate with a higher level of effort due to the salary increase or not. Like trust games, gift-exchange games are used to study reciprocity for human subject research in social psychology and economics. If the employer pays extra salary and the employee puts in extra effort, then both players are better off than otherwise. The relationship between an investor and an investee has been investigated as the same type of a game.
