| All Thursday Sessions take place in Gross 270 or in the Winter Garden outside the room |  |
 |
|
| Thursday | |||
| Time | Speaker | Seminar Title | Seminar Abstract |
| 8:30-9:00 | Breakfast and Welcome | ||
| 9:00-10:00 | Jon Woon | Behavioral Inference, Beliefs, and Strategic Sophistication | This session provides an overview of using incentivized experiments for theory testing and behavioral inference. The close relationship between theoretical models and experiments provides a way to develop and refine new models of preferences and strategic sophistication, while also highlighting the importance of beliefs and learning to a greater extent than in classical models. |
| 10:00-10:15 | Break | ||
| 10:15-11:15 | David Siegel | Stochastic and Computational Modeling | This session provides an overview to tools of formal theory often useful in the instantiation and analysis of behavioral models, i.e., models which make extensive use of assumptions grounded in the behavioral literature. We’ll discuss the connections between stochastic processes and computational models, differences from and similarities to game theory, and how one might acquire and use this toolkit to further one’s own research. |
| 11:15-11:30 | Break | ||
| 11:30-12:30 | Rachel Kranton | Beyond Money and Markets | Much of economic and political activity is shaped by social norms and social relations. This session provides an overview of how economists model and understand norms and networks. Starting with a canonical model of preferences, the seminar will present the model of decision-making where people care about who are they and about how they and others are supposed to behave. The seminar will also show how economists incorporate social and other connections into formal models of interaction. |
| 12:30-1:30 | Lunch | ||
| 1:30-2:30 | Mark Turner | Cognitive Neuroscientific Models of Decision-Making | As models of human decision-making are changing, the correlated cognitive neuroscientific models have changed. We are now in a new age of cognitive neuroscientific analysis, considerably removed from the theoretical approaches that seemed to accord with early game-theoretic models of choosing. This session will briefly review the historical relationship between models of decision-making and cognitive neuroscientific models of brain operation, with emphasis on new directions from cognitive neuroscience for the theory of decision-making. |
| 2:30-2:45 | Break | ||
| 2:45-3:45 | Rick Wilson | Canonical Incentivized Behavioral Measures | This session will cover several standard measures we have developed for risk, time discounting, pro social preferences, etc. It will provide online examples, talk about design and provide some correlations with non-incentivized instruments measuring the same things. |
| 3:45-4:00 | Break | ||
| 4:00-5:00 | Liz Carlson | Using (and Abusing) Field Experiments to Test New Theories | Before running a field experiment, there are practical steps to take that will help ensure the experiment will return useful and publishable results. But laying the groundwork for a field experiment includes far more than power analyses and pre-registration. Field experiments have high material and ethical costs. Strong and accurate priors about subjects’ response to treatment are necessary to avoid wasting resources on treatments that have little chance ex ante of producing effects and, more importantly, to anticipate and avoid introducing serious real-world harm. Developing such priors requires a complete research agenda with solid theoretical models and clearly identified assumptions, both of which have been repeatedly tested with less risky approaches. Using field experiments to test novel theories is neither efficient nor ethical. In this session, I will give examples of both proper and problematic field experiments, and identify how researchers can determine whether a field experiment is an appropriate way to test their theory. |
| 5:00-5:15 | Break | ||
| 5:15-6:15 | Eric Dickson | Psychological Approaches to Modeling Politics | This session focuses on the nexus between social psychological and game theoretic approaches to studying politics. It offers an introduction to the inclusion of psychological insights into game theoretic models, and argues that both psychological and game theoretic research can be improved by the incorporation of ideas and methods from the opposite methodological tradition. Implications for empirical and experimental research are also discussed. |
| 6:30-8:30 | Mentoring Dinner |
