Sponsored by: The College of Social Sciences & Public Policy 

 and 

NBER

The conference will be held April 24-26, 2025 in Tallahassee, Florida

Call for Papers

NBER/CEME Decentralization Conference

Artificial Intelligence, Mechanism Design and Human Behavior: Experiments and Theory

Hosted by the College of Social Science and Public Policy at Florida State University and the XS/FS experimental laboratory

April 24-26, 2025

Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches have garnered substantial popular and academic interest recently. Not the least among those concerns relate to how human behavior will be impacted by AI. Likewise, the experimental economics method has a long history of helping people understand behavior when traditional theoretical models might be lacking. In fact, there are numerous examples of experimental economics research that could be considered foundational to the nascent AI approach. For example, studies on agent traders in markets, models of learning, Turing tournaments, and evolutionary learning are areas where experiments have played a critical role.

Following the 2024 Decentralization Conference it was concluded that “the challenges and opportunities created by AI and distributed ledgers reinvigorate many of the core themes and questions that have animated this conference for the past fifty years.   The mechanism design community possesses tools, insights, and theories that can advance our understanding of these technologies and guide their implementation and regulation. Likewise, the experimental laboratory has played a critical role in examining these mechanisms to determine whether attractive theoretical properties translate to practice and, if not, how mechanism theory might evolve.

The objective of this symposium and to further explore the potential collaborations and contributions between mechanism design theory,  experimental economics method and artificial intelligence research. Topics of interests include (but are not limited to):

• Human and computer interaction

• AI assisted forecasting, decision making, and strategy formation

• Behavioral responses to AI agents

• AI attempts to mimic human behavior

• Design of mechanisms with AI based participants

• AI approaches to experiment design

• Machine learning approaches to experimental data analysis

• Behavior on distributed networks

Researchers from diverse disciplines including economics, computer science, psychology, and sociology are encouraged to attend and potentially submit an extended abstract/paper for consideration. Papers that utilize a mix of theory and experiments or experimental data are of particular interest but purely theoretical or empirical analyses will be considered.

We will accept 8-10 well-developed and promising extended abstracts/papers for presentation at the conference. Invited speakers will have reasonable travel and lodging expenses covered. Since the conference would like to facilitate new research in these areas, a limited number of modest travel grants will be provided to early career scholars or graduate students wishing to attend.

Paper Submission Deadline: February 7, 2025

Final Agenda Announced: February 17, 2025

Local Organizing Committee:

Luke Boosey (Florida State University)

Anthony Kwasnica (Florida State University)

Mark Isaac (Florida State University)

Scientific Committee:

Scott Page (Michigan)

Tanya Rosenblat (Michigan)

Anthony Kwasncia (Florida State)

Yiling Chen (Harvard)

REE Volume Call

Volume of Research in Experimental Economics

Title/Subtitle: Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Methods

Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches have garnered substantial popular and academic interest recently. Not the least among those concerns relate to how human behavior will be impacted by AI. Likewise, the experimental economics method has a long history of helping people understand behavior when traditional theoretical models might be lacking. The objective of this edited volume of Research in Experimental Economics is to further explore the potential collaborations and contributions between the experimental economics method and artificial intelligence research.

Researchers from diverse disciplines including economics, computer science, psychology, and sociology are encouraged to submit papers for consideration. While original research is preferred, retrospective or meta analyses of previous work will be considered when of high quality and potential impact. For example, surveys of early experimental contributions to the nascent AI literature would be particularly welcome. Likewise, AIs such as large-language models provide unique sandboxes for prototyping experimental designs and analyzing multi-modal experimental data from human participants (such as unstructured chat logs, audio and video). Articles that demonstrate the state of the art and make it accessible to experimental researchers would be particularly interesting as we expect such contributions to have a high impact as this area develops.

Topics of interests include (but are not limited to):

• Piloting experimental design using large-language model simulators

• AI attempts to mimic human behavior

• AI approaches to experimental data analysis

• Human and computer interaction

• AI assisted forecasting, decision making, and strategy formation

• Behavioral responses to AI agents

• Design of mechanisms with AI based participants

• AI assisted forecasting and decision making

• Behavior on distributed networks

Presenters at the 2025 NSF/CEME Decentralization Conference will be invited to submit a full length version of their paper no later than 6 weeks following the conference for consideration for publication in an edited volume of Research in Experimental Economics. Authors not wishing to attend the conference but seeking publication in this volume are asked to submit an extended abstract/paper no later than April 1, 2025 with anticipated initial signal of acceptance by May 15, 2025.  If you have any questions about whether a particular topic would be a good fit for this volume, we invite you to contact the co-editors (emails below) for feedback.

Following submission, papers will undergo at least one round of review with anticipation of final acceptance of papers no later than September 15, 2025.  

Co-Editors of volume in Research in Experimental Economics on Artificial Intelligence

Tanya Rosenblat (University of Michigan)  trosenbl@umich.edu

Anthony Kwasnica (Florida State University) akwasnica@fsu.edu

Registration and Submission