Grants

Harvard University

To create and deploy a Laboratory for Online Research in Economics

  • Amount $293,250
  • City Cambridge, MA
  • Investigator Erez Lieberman Aiden
  • Year 2012
  • Program Research
  • Sub-program Economics

Many seminal experiments in behavioral economics have been performed using small groups of undergraduates at elite universities as subjects. Drawing robust scientific conclusions from these experiments is difficult. Student test subjects are, in general, whiter, richer, younger, and more American than the world populace taken as a whole. In addition, the campus laboratories that conduct such experiments are expensive to run, limiting the number of students that can be tested. Given the new possibilities opened up by the advent of the Internet, there should be easier ways to gather behavioral data using large numbers of participants from all over the world. This grant supports a project by Harvard's Erez Liberman Aiden to develop a user-friendly platform for creating, performing, and tracking large-scale economic experiments online. Called the "Laboratory for Online Research in Economics" (LORE), the platform will invite online visitors to participate in economic experiments, beginning in with classic "matrix games" such as the Prisoners' Dilemma or the Public Goods game and eventually expanding to include auction and market simulations with complex matching protocols and population structures. Harvard has funded the creation of a preliminary version of the LORE platform. Funds from this grant would pay for hardware, the hiring of a programmer, and provision of player incentives.

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