CELG Seminar with editor in chief of the journal of behavioral and experimental economics

The College of Economics, Law and Government would like to respectfully invite lecturers/ researchers to come and share your experiences at the CELG seminar:

Topic: Running experiments with teenagers: Challenges and some results

Presenter: Prof. Pablo Garza, Editor in Chief, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics

Time: 10:30 AM (Vietnamese Time), Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Location: Room B1-1001, 279 Nguyen Tri Phuong St, Ward 5, Dist 10, HCMC

There is an increasing interest in how to conduct experiments with teenagers by economists. This talk evaluates whether different methodological factors impact the answers of teenagers to standard experimental tasks measuring tools preferences, risk preferences, cognitive abilities and financial abilities. Results show that incentivizing subjects with hypothetical payments elicits similar results than real payments. We also find that an interface asking subjects to choose between options increases the quality of answers and that adding a visual aspect to this interface further improves the quality of answers by subjects.

We also find that the type of electronic device on which subjects answer the task and that administrating the experiment by teachers does not influence results.

The second part of this talk reports evidence on teenagers decision-making. A large and powered sample of n=2467 subjects completed several well-known tasks in a lab-in-the-field experiment: time preferences (MPL), reflective abilities (CRT), financial abilities (Fin), risk preferences (Holt-Laury) and probability abilities (Delavande). Results show that teenagers answer rapidly and with high consistency time and risk preferences tasks that are adapted to them by using visualization. The quality of their answers increase with age and their preferences remain stable across age. They also obtain good results in the cognitive abilities questionnaires, but their performance is sensible to the difficulty of the question. We observe little gender differences in the experiment. We also find that time and risk preferences are not correlated, and that cognitive abilities play a critical role in increasing consistency and influencing preferences.

About presenter:

Prof. Brañas-Garza joined Loyola Andalucia University as Professor of Behavioural Economics in March 2018. Previously he was Professor of Behavioural Economics at Middlesex University London (2012-18) and Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Granada (2009-12). Since 2011 he is affiliated member of the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University (USA).

His research has been published in leading journals such us Proc Royal Society B, Int Econ Rev, Eur Econ Rev, Games Econ Beh, Exp Econ, Evol Hum Beh, Biol Let, Persp Psych Science, J Conflict Res, Eco Letters, JEBO, J Beh Dec Mak, Jud Dec Mak, JMC&B, J Eco Psych or Nat Sc Rep.  Summary of citations (Google, Dec 2022): >4,500 citations, h=38.

His research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, British ESRC, Fundación Ramón Areces, Andalucía Excellence Groups and AACID. He is also the PI of the Spanish Network of Behavioral and Experimental Economics “e3c” (RED2018-102353-T).

Currently, he is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics and member of ESRC Peer Review College (since 2015). Since 2022 he is member of the IRB Committee of the Spanish Ministry of Migrations and Social Affairs.

Previously, PBG served as President of the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (2016-2018). He was Academic Editor of PLoS ONE (2013-21) and Associate Editor of JBEE (2016-21). He has reviewed papers for many journals (AER, JEEA, EER, Nature, MSc, etc.) and research agencies (ANEP, COST, ESRC, ERC, ICREA, Swiss F, Leverhulme, FWO, etc.).

PBG has lead projects for Fundación La Caixa, COTEC, World Bank (DIME), Peruvian Government and launched capacity building programs for public servants from Argentina, Ghana, Tanzania, or Pakistan. In the last year, he coordinated a project for the Central American Bank of Economic Integration to develop a new index of multidimensional poverty. Currently he is leading a project to run experiments in high schools to inform teachers about their students’ abilities (and social cohesion/conflict).

PBG has supervised 16 PhD students (+ 4 ongoing). He was the director of the PhD Economics (Granada) and later at Middlesex University. He launched the London PhD workshop (founded by the ESRC) and since 2019 started the e3c Early Career Researchers Workshop. He founded the GLOBE research group at Granada and the LoyolaBehLAB at Loyola.

He published a book on Experimental Economics with Antoni Bosch (2011) the a second book on Experimental Economics: Applications (with Antonio Cabrales) published by Palgrave (2015). He will publish a new book on Stochastic Choice (with John Smith) with Cambridge University Press in 2023.

He has received several awards: Tom Bausch Best Paper Award (2021), Loyola Uni Research Prize (2019), PODER Innovation prize, Peru (2017), Granada University Young Researcher (2007) and three Sexenios (2014-2019, 2008-2013, 2002-2007).

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