ECON3326 · Economics

Experimental Economics

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

This course is for anyone who wants to be able to answer questions using experiments. This course is an introduction to experimental methods, particularly those developed by economists. We will discuss in detail all of the steps of an experiment, from design, measurement and randomization, to cost and power analyses. This is strictly a methods course; the experiments we discuss are chosen to give a broad understanding of experimental methods, not a foundation of famous experimental results. Nonetheless, we will cover experiments in a variety of interesting fields: behavioral economics, economics of developing countries, discrimination, labor economics, cognitive and social psychology, and more. There are two main value-addeds from this course. First, you will be equipped to design and run an experiment to answer important questions. Second, in understanding what the optimal experimental design should look like, you will be armed with better lenses through which to view naturally existing data.