Block A
The block is scheduled on Day 1–2 of the summer school and consists of 9 hours of lectures and 3 hours of a workshop.
The lectures give you a basic overview of Behavioral Public Policy and cover mainly (but not exclusively) the following topics:
– (De)Motivating Good Behaviour
– Guides for Choice Architects
– Behavioural Public Policy: when theory meets practice
– Ethics in behavioural economics applications
During the workshop, the lecturer will help you develop a research topic that you will further develop during the remainder of the program. Should this block be the only one you attend, the lecturer will provide you with additional study materials on the topic you find most interesting.
This block is worth 1 ECTS. To obtain it, in addition to attending all classes (12 hrs.), you will also need to take a final exam.
Block B
The block is scheduled on Day 3–6 of the summer school and consists of 18 hours of lectures and 6 hours of workshops.
The first two days of the block are dedicated to the basic experimental methodology and cover mainly (but not exclusively) the following topics:
– life cycle of an experiment
– basic principles of laboratory experiments and RCTs
– basic experimental games
– internal validity (selection of participants, sample size, confounds in treatment, the role of anonymity)
– external validity (stake sizes, WEIRD subject pools)
– writing the experimental instructions
– pre-registration of an experimental study
The methodology part concludes with a workshop focused on designing an experimental study on a topic students selected in Block A or that they already have (for instance, a topic of one's thesis).
The third day of the block is dedicated to LIONESS Lab, a free web-based platform for interactive online experiments. The first half of the day provides you with sufficient theoretical background that you use later in the workshop. During the workshop, you create your own online experiment that you will run and obtain some data.
On the fourth day of the block, you review the basic statistical methods to analyze the data you obtained the previous day. The lectures are focused mainly on interpreting rather than executing the statistics. We cover mainly (but not exclusively) the following methods:
– chi-square, t-test (parametric and non-parametric)
– ANOVA with posthoc tests
– Linear regression (OLS)
– Probit regression with marginal effects
This block is worth 4 ECTS. To obtain it, in addition to attending all classes (24 hrs.), you will also need to submit a research paper reporting on the experiment you developed and ran during the course.
Block C
The block is scheduled on Day 7–8 of the summer school and consists of 9 hours of lectures and 3 hours of workshops.
This block teaches the basics of programming in R, the free statistical software that many researchers use. It covers mainly (but not exclusively) the following topics:
– Working with variables and vectors
– Working with data.frames & Loading and saving data
– Data visualizations
The block concludes with a workshop in which you analyze data obtained in Block B (or your own data / example data) under the supervision of your lecturer.
This block is worth 1 ECTS. To obtain it, in addition to attending all classes (12 hrs.), you will also need to take a final exam.
COURSE SCHEDULE
The course runs from Saturday to Tuesday (Day 1–4), Wednesday is a free day, and the program continues from Thursday to Sunday (Day 5–8).
Each lecture lasts 60 minutes. Morning lectures start at 8:30 and finish at 12:30. Afternoon lectures start at 13:30 and finish at 17:30. If not set otherwise, the break after each lecture lasts 30 minutes. All times are in Central European Time (CET).