Course 2024-2025 a.y.

Classes: 31 (II sem.)

Instructors:
Class 31: LUCA BRAGHIERI

Prior knowledge in Calculus, Probability Theory, Inference, and Econometrics is helpful but not strictly necessary.

This course offers an interdisciplinary journey through experimental economics and psychology, focusing on how social science experiments enhance our understanding of human behavior and social dynamics. We start by exploring foundational concepts, including evolutionary perspectives on behavior and robust methods for establishing causality in both lab and field settings. With these foundations, we dive into influential early studies in experimental economics, such as the ultimatum and public goods games, which reveal key insights into cooperation, fairness, and altruism. We then explore modern applications where experimental economics has made significant contributions. First, we address discrimination, examining empirical methods for documenting bias and strategies to reduce it. Next, we delve into social norms and signaling, analyzing how norms shape behavior and impact broader outcomes like information diffusion. Our third topic is social media: we investigate how experiments help us understand its effects on individual users and political engagement. Finally, we examine what experimental studies can tell us about political behavior, such a voting. This course equips students with critical analytical tools and experimental insights applicable across social science fields.

The course covers the following topics. (Some topics take more than one lecture.)

 

1. Evolution: Explore how evolutionary theory provides insights into human behavior and decision-making patterns in social contexts.
2. Causality: Learn rigorous approaches for identifying cause-and-effect relationships.
3. Randomized controlled trials and natural experiments: Understand the design, execution, and interpretation of experiments in controlled and real-world settings. Understand the difference between natural experiments (where randomization is not explicit) and randomized experiments (where randomization is explicit).
4. Classic work in experimental economics: Study foundational experiments—like the ultimatum and public goods games—that reveal key insights into cooperation, fairness, and altruism.
5. Discrimination: Examine empirical methods for detecting and understanding discrimination, as well as experimental strategies aimed at reducing it.
6. Social contact: Investigate the "contact hypothesis" and how exposure to diverse social groups can reduce prejudice and influence social attitudes.
7. Social norms and signaling: Analyze how social norms influence individual behavior and how signaling affects broader outcomes, such as the diffusion of information.
8. Social media: Explore experimental research on the impacts of social media on individual behavior, beliefs, and social dynamics.
9. Political behavior: Delve into experiments on political behavior, including studies on voter turnout, information dissemination, and information acquisition.

At the end of the course student will be able to...

At the end of the course students will be able to:

 

• describe key concepts in evolutionary theory;
• describe the theoretical basis on which researchers can make causal claims;
• discuss the experimental evidence on discrimination;
• discuss the experimental evidence about the contact hypothesis;
• discuss the evidence that supports the important role of social norms in affecting human behavior;
• discuss the experimental evidence on the effects of social media;
• understand the way experimental data is analyzed and evidence is established and presented.

At the end of the course student will be able to...

At the end of the course students will be able to:

 

• identify settings in which causal claims are warranted and in which they are unwarranted;
• read an experimental paper and understand why the paper is written and what question it seeks to answer, its results, and findings;
• propose a way to resolve a question about people’s behavior or validate a theory by the means of an experiment, including developing an incentive scheme ruling out potential alternative explanations;
• critically assess the design of someone else’s experiment;
• evaluate the arguments and evidence presented in an experimental study and their strength.

• Lectures
• Collaborative Works / Assignments

Lectures will be face-to-face

 

Group assignments: a project that covers several stages of an experiment.

	Continuous assessment	Partial exams	General exam
Written individual exam (traditional/online)			x
Collaborative Works / Assignment (report, exercise, presentation, project work etc.)	x

Exams help assess the degree to which students understand the material.

 

Group assignments allow students to get some practice with experimental methods while developing important teamwork and presentation skills.

 

Students will be evaluated as follows:

• 40% of their grade will come from the team assignment
• 60% of their grade will come from the final exam

 

Both the team assignment and the final exam will be graded on a 100-point scale. The total score, computed as the weighted sum of the points earned for each of the activities, will be converted into the transcript grade using a scale that is approximately linear and calibrated to match the typical grade curve of an elective course at Bocconi.

 

The group project should be devoted to an experimental study. It needs to cover one of the following two points:

 

• proposal of an original question for an experimental study and a review of relevant literature;
• proposal of an original question and design of an experiment;

 

Furthermore, students have to make an in-class presentation of the results of their work on one of the above points.

 

Students taking the course are expected to self-organize into groups. Each group should consist of two or three people (three is a hard limit). Everyone in a group gets the same grade. One class around the middle of the semester will be devoted to discussing project proposals with the instructor. In-class presentations will happen on the last two days of class.

The final exam will last 60 minutes and will contain a mixture of quantitative and non-quantitative questions.

The main source of course material is lectures. Lecture slides will be posted on the Bocconi blackboard site.

 

The lectures will primarily be based on research papers. The research papers themselves will be listed in the syllabus and students are encouraged to read them.

 

If needed, the following books may be used for an overview of some topics discussed in the course:

 

• Kagel and Roth, The Handbook of Experimental Economics, Vol. I (1995), Chapter 8;
• Kagel and Roth, The Handbook of Experimental Economics, Vol. II (2015), Chapters 1, 2, and 8.