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Funding body: Macaulay Development Trust (MDT)
This workshop is funded by the MDT in the framework of the project ‘Introducing experimental methods for the study of resource and land-related decisions in rural Scotland’. The experimental team consists of Simone Piras, Laure Kuhfuss and James Gurd from SEGS, and Peter Cock from ICS.
This online workshop aims to introduce experimental methods in economics to all Hutton employees and PhD students by inviting you to play real, incentivised economic experiments. We would like to show you how individual decision-making can be studied through experimental approaches. This will hopefully lead to many fruitful collaborations in future interdisciplinary projects involving a social science (behavioural) component.
The use of experimental methods is becoming increasingly popular in social sciences, and especially in economics. These allow us to observe and better understand stakeholders’ decision-making and interactions in a controlled environment. In some economic experiments, participants are asked to play serious ‘games’ that mimic decisions they would make in everyday life. The specificity of incentivised economic experiments is that the decisions made by participants lead to real payments to them. While this is not the case for all types of economic experiments, financial incentive is required for the type of research being done in this study. This is because, if the choices made by participants affect the value of the payment they receive, their decisions in the experiments are closer to the ones they would make in real life, which have actual consequences on welfare. This is particularly important when individuals have to choose between immediate individual gains and longer-term common good, as in most resource- and land-related decisions.
The best way to appreciate the potential of incentivised economic experiments is to participate in one of them. Furthermore, a larger sample would allow us to implement a more rigorous analysis. The results will be shared and discussed with you as well as with invited external speakers with an expertise in experimental economics, in the framework of a debriefing session on 28 February between 2-4pm.
You have been divided into two groups. Each group will be provided a link to the experimental page. A member of the experimental team will guide you through the whole session, reading the instructions aloud. You will interact with other participants in your group, but you will not know each other’s identity. You will be asked to make a number of decisions. At the end of the economic experiments, you will be asked to fill in a short questionnaire. We expect the full experimental session to last about 30 minutes.
Your participation is entirely voluntary; you will be free to withdraw from the research for any reason, and at any point of the process.
You will receive a payment whose amount depends on your decisions, others’ decisions, as well as on chance. We foresee an average payment of £25.00, including a participation fee of {{ session.config.participation_fee }} which does not depend on your and others’ decisions and on chance. Your total earnings will be communicated to you privately at the end of the last game today. Other participants will not know your total earnings. You will be paid this money in your next payslip. Note that the money earned will be subject to taxation and national insurance.
To process your payment we need your SID, which will be requested in the final questionnaire. Therefore, if you withdraw from the research before then, we will not be able to pay you.
Any decisions you make during the behavioural experiment and any answers you provide to the final questionnaire will be treated with full confidentiality.
Responses will be anonymised; your name will not be linked with the research materials, and you will not be identified in the project outputs (report, blog post, publications). Only general findings will be shared with the funder and other parties.
The James Hutton Institute (‘Hutton’, ‘us’, or ‘we’) will use the data you provide for the purposes of the above project. We are the data controller for your personal data. Our legal basis for processing your data is that it is necessary to perform this research study as a ‘task in the public interest’. With your consent, we will collect your SID number in order to process your payment and we will delete this afterwards.
During the experiment, the data will be stored in a GDPR-compliant server provided by the cloud platform Heroku. At the end of the session, these will be downloaded by the research team and stored on secure devices. Heroku will not store any data.
We will only retain your data for as long as is necessary to fulfil the research undertaken on the project and deliver project outcomes, and we will not transfer it outside of the UK and EEA.
Please see our Privacy Notice at www.hutton.ac.uk/terms and the Employee Privacy Notice at http://connect.hutton.ac.uk/Organisation/HR/policies-and-procedures/procedures for further information, or contact our Data Protection Officer on dpo@hutton.ac.uk or by telephone at 01382 346814.
This research project is led by a multidisciplinary team of researchers of the James Hutton Institute, including Simone Piras, Laure Kuhfuss, James Gurd, and Peter Cock.
If you have any questions at any time, please feel free to contact:
Simone Piras: Simone.Piras@hutton.ac.uk, 01224 395399
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