Program Calendar Program (Graduate)
1) Read and understand the papers from the reading list.
2) Show your proficiency in a mid-term exam.
3) Replicate a classical experiment:
- Choose an interesting experiment (you will have to coordinate with your fellow students so that all areas of the Program are covered with the replications. Otherwise, my rule is first come, first serve.)
- Make the necessary changes in the original experiment, keeping in mind your time constraint of 1 hour, that the number of players that will be participating may be different, that you don't use computers to run the experiment, etc.
- Think of the incentives that you are going to be using to motivate your experimental subjects (be careful with prizes!). Your instructor will not help you with cash, unless you are very very persuasive.
- Write the instructions extremely carefully. Do it in a neutral language and make sure that you are not pushing the subjects in any direction. Imprecise, sloppy or tendentious instructions will screw up your experiment and your grade.
- Organize well your experiment. You have to plan and rehearse in advance all the moves, as in show biz. Make sure that you know where to seat each one of the subjects, whether you seat them at random or not, how you pick up and hand back decision sheets, what information you are going to provide during the experiment, how are you going to manage that subjects do not communicate, or how do you want them to communicate, what emergency measures are you going to take if some subjects do not show up, etc.).
4) Present the experiment and its results:
- Start with the motivation, which means the why and the how. Compare the experiment with the related literature. Describe what went well and what went wrong in your experiment. Present the results. Compare them with the original results. Explain similarities and differences.
- Take care of the presentation of your data. You want to be clear and convincing. Select the main results to be presented graphically, and present them well; the figures and tables should be readable (large font), and clearly labeled; use colors. But beware of being too fancy; you do not want your audience too distracted.
5) Run your original experiment:
- The same advise as above plus THINK HARD. Don't be too ambitious, ... or too meek. It is not easy to think of a new and interesting experiment, that can be run in class, and which leads to some insights. Again, then, THINK HARD or you may bungle it.
6) Write a paper (about 10-15 pages) as they are written in the professional journals that you read for this course. The paper should contain:
- Background literature
- Motivation
- Theoretic solution
- Design of experiment
- Results of experiments (summary statistic).
- Descriptive analysis of your data (model). The model can be verbal.
- Conclusion
- References
- Appendix with instructions and raw data
- Tables and Figures