Course details
The course includes online lectures and two in-person (hybrid) sessions in Helsinki and Lund.
Helsinki (Finland): September 24 (in person/hybrid), immediately before the 18th Nordic Conference in Behavioral and Experimental Economics
Lund (Sweden): November 16 (in person/hybrid), one-day final session. The session in Lund will be followed by a workshop of the Copenhagen Network for Experimental Economists (CNEE) on November 17. Students are welcome, but not required to, attend at this workshop.
Participants are required to attend at least one of the in-person sessions (and may follow the other session online or in person).
Between the two in-person events, there will be a series of online lectures covering the interplay between theory and experiments across different subfields of economics. The course also includes a lecture on open science practices, including pre-registration.
The course will cover topics of behavioral public economics, behavioral environmental economics, behavioral finance, behavioral development economics, behavioral IO, behavioral macro, behavioral market design, behavioral game theory, and behavioral decision theory.
Lectures
Here are the scheduled 10 lectures of the course:
Thursday September 24, 12:30pm – 6 pm: Helsinki session (in person/hybrid), auditorium Futurum (in the basement of Hanken)
Welcome, in Auditorium Futurum 12:30 - 12:40
Lunch in restaurant Perho 12:45 - 13:45
Lecture 1: Kirby Nielsen (California Institute of Technology), 2pm - 4pm: Revealed Preference and Choice Procedures in Behavioral Economics
Nielsen, K., & Rehbeck, J. (2022). When choices are mistakes. American Economic Review, 112(7), 2237-2268.
Nielsen, K., & Rigotti, L. (2026). Revealed incomplete preferences. Unpublished manuscript
Arrieta, G., & Nielsen, K. (2025). Procedural decision-making in the face of complexity. Unpublished manuscript
Lecture 2: Sandro Ambühl (University of Zürich), 4pm – 6 pm: Mental Models of (Causal) Structure in Economics and Psychology
Friday October 2 at 10am CET:
Karine Nyborg (University of Oslo) Using self-selection to improve cooperation in groups
Brekke, K. A., and K. Nyborg (2008): Attracting Responsible Employees: Green Production as Labor Market Screening, Resource and Energy Economics 39, 509-526.
Brekke, K.A., K.E. Hauge, J.T. Lind, and K. Nyborg (2011): Playing with the Good Guys: A Public Good Game with Endogenous Group Formation, Journal of Public Economics 95, 1111-1118.
Hauge, K.E., K.A. Brekke, K. Nyborg, J.T. Lind (2018): Sustaining cooperation through self-sorting: The good, the bad, and the conditional, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 116 (12), 5299-5304.
Friday October 9 at 10am CET: Bounded Rationality and Behavioral Game Theory
Evan Friedman (Paris School of Economics)
Friday October 16 at 10am CET:
Christoph Huber (Aalto University): Making Experiments Credible: From Replication to Preregistration
Brodeur, A., Lé, M., Sangnier, M., & Zylberberg, Y. (2016). Star wars: The empirics strike back. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 8(1), 1–32.
Gelman, A., & Carlin, J. (2014). Beyond power calculations: Assessing Type S (sign) and Type M (magnitude) errors. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(6), 641–651.
Huber, C., Dreber, A., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., Kirchler, M., Weitzel, U., et al. (2023). Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs. PNAS, 120(23), e2215572120.
Huber, C., Holzmeister, F., Johannesson, M., König-Kersting, C., Dreber, A., Huber, J., & Kirchler, M. Do experimental asset market results replicate? High-powered preregistered replications of 17 key results. Journal of Finance, forthcoming. (SSRN: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5048949)
Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2021). Pre-registration: Why and how. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 31(1), 151–162.
Friday October 23 at 10am CET:
Maria Bigoni (University of Bologna): Monetary Exchange and Cooperation among Strangers
Bigoni, M., Camera, G., & Casari, M. (2019): Partners or Strangers? Cooperation, monetary trade, and the choice of scale of interaction, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 11(2), 195-227.
Bigoni, M., Camera, G., & Casari M. (2020): Money is more than memory, Journal of Monetary Economics 110: 99-115.
Bigoni, M., Camera, G., & Gallo E. (2026): Money and social exclusion in networks, Working Paper.
Friday October 30 at 3pm CET !! NOTICE EXCEPTIONAL TIME !!:
Jonathan Zinman (Dartmouth College): Generating field data to discipline and apply behavioral theory: Evidence from payday borrowers
Allcott, H., Kim, J., Taubinsky, D., & Zinman, J. (2022). Are high-interest loans predatory? theory and evidence from payday lending. The Review of Economic Studies, 89(3), 1041-1084.
Stango, V., Zinman, J. (2023): We are all behavioral, more or less: A taxonomy of consumer decision making Review of Economic Studies, 90(3), 1470-1498
Alan, S., Cemalcilar, M., Karlan, D., Zinman, J. (2018): Unshrouding: Evidence from bank overdrafts in Turkey Journal of Finance, 73(2), 481-522 (lead article), with
Friday November 6:
Johannes Wohlfart (University of Cologne) Open-ended data in economics
Haaland, I., Roth, C., Stantcheva, S., & Wohlfart, J. (2025). Understanding economic behavior using open-ended survey data. Journal of Economic Literature, 63(4), 1244-1280.
Link, S., Peichl, A., Pfäuti, O., Roth, C., & Wohlfart, J. (2026). Attention to the Macroeconomy. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, qjag047.
Andre, P., Haaland, I., Roth, C., Wiederholt, M., & Wohlfart, J. (2026). Narratives about the Macroeconomy. Review of Economic Studies, rdag014.
Monday November 16: Lund session (in person/hybrid)
Lecture 1: Dorothea Kübler (WZB – TU Berlin) AI and market design: How behavioral and experimental economics matter
Hakimov, R., Heller C-P., Kübler D., & Kurino, M. (2021). How to Avoid Black Markets for Appointments with Online Booking Systems. American Economic Review, 111(7), 2127-51
Dargnies M-P., Hakimov D., & Kübler D. (2024). Hiring Algorithms: Transparency, Gender Profiling, and Self-Confidence. Management Science. Published Online: June 19, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02774
Dargnies M-P., Hakimov, R., & Kübler, D. (2025). Behavioral Measures Improve AI Hiring: A Field Experiment. Working Paper.
Lecture 2: Florian Zimmermann (University of Bonn) Memory and Belief Formation
Motivated Memory:
“Investor Memory” Katrin Gödker, Peiran Jiao & Paul Smeets, Review of Financial Studies (2025), 38(6): 1595–1640
“Persistent Overconfidence and Biased Memory: Evidence from Managers” David Huffman, Collin Raymond & Julia Shvets, American Economic Review (2022), 112(10): 3141–3175
“The Dynamics of Motivated Beliefs” Florian Zimmermann, American Economic Review (2020), 110(2): 337–361
Imperfect Memory:
“Associative Memory, Beliefs and Market Interactions”, Benjamin Enke, Frederik Schwerter & Florian Zimmermann, Journal of Financial Economics (2024), 157: 103853
“Stories, Statistics, and Memory” Thomas Graeber, Christopher Roth & Florian Zimmermann, Quarterly Journal of Economics (2024), 139(4): 2181–2225
“What Jobs Come to Mind? Stereotypes about Fields of Study”, John J. Conlon & Dev Patel, Quarterly Journal of Economics (2026)
Examination and assignments
The examination consists of one smaller method-related assignment and a final assignment which presents a research idea.
Participants are assigned to an international group of three PhD student members. Each group submits a theme and is then assigned a supervisor. Groups meet with their supervisor twice: once before Assignment 1 and once after. The group prepares a poster which presents a research idea on a topic relating to the course materials and methods. Ideally, at least one of the group members will be present in Lund and ready to present the poster prepared by the group. Grading is pass/fail.
Assignment 1 (method-related): Power calculation.
Work in your assigned group.
In the assignment behind this link, you are asked to complete a power calculation for a replication study of Holm et al. (2024). In addition, you are asked to take the first steps in performing a power calculation for the study under design in your group, if possible.
You are required to provide a PDF document describing how you performed your analysis, including the methods used, the assumptions made, and any relevant results or findings. Also, report the first steps or plans regarding power calculation for the study / group project under design in your group, if possible.
The PDF should be named using the format Surnames_Assignment1.pdf, where Surnames is the list of surnames of participants in the group.
Send the assignment to ncbee@hanken.fi
Deadline: Please complete the submission by the 23th of October, 10:00/11:00 (CET/EET), that is before the next online lecture.
Assignment: Assignment 1 - Power Calculations.pdf
Data: assignment_1_data.dta
Assignment 2 (final): Presentation of a research idea in the form of a poster, with content similar to a pre-registered report. Posters are submitted one week before the Lund session. Each group then provides feedback on the posters of two other groups. Presentations take place as a short online session with pitches followed by an hour of poster visits in Lund. Groups that do not pass write a mini pre-registered report (max. 5 pages) for review.
Important dates and deadlines
Thursday September 24: Helsinki session (in person/hybrid)
Friday September 25 and Saturday 26: Nordic Conference in Behavioral and Experimental Economics. (optional, PhD students participate free of charge)
Thursday October 1: Deadline for submitting group theme
Friday October 23: Deadline Assignment 1
Monday November 9: Deadline Assignment 2 (poster)
Monday November 16: Deadline peer review of two other groups’ posters
Monday November 16: Lund session (in person/hybrid)
Tuesday November 17: CNEE workshop in Lund (optional)
Practical information