Supervisor: Dr Michelle Lee
What is your team’s project about?
1. The project targets tertiary education students in Singapore. These students were chosen because research indicates that climate literacy among young adults is relatively low, leading to unsustainable consumption and commuting behaviors. We hope to expand it to a larger target group in the future.
2. The project is a collaboration between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore. LTA is interested in promoting sustainable commuting behaviors and sees this project as a complementary effort to its infrastructure and policy initiatives.
3. The project employs prediction markets as a tool to increase climate literacy and awareness of sustainable commuting choices. A digital prediction market platform will be developed where students make climate-related predictions and are incentivized to learn through financial rewards and psychological mechanisms (like loss aversion).
What does your team enjoy most about the IEx project?
We really enjoy butting heads over conceptual ideas—especially when it comes to exploring behavior around money, climate, and how people’s attitudes towards climate change actually play out in real life. It’s always interesting to see how people respond when there’s an incentive involved, and we love debating what really drives behavior. Designing a proper mechanism and website to approach this project has been quite rewarding. Beyond that, we’re also just a really chill group that works well together. We joke around a lot, which makes even the more tedious parts of the project way more enjoyable. Having that balance of deep discussions and fun moments keeps things engaging for all of us!
What are some challenges that you think are unique to the project?
One challenge that’s been pretty unique to our project is the long wait for IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval. We knew it was necessary, but we didn’t realize just how long the process would take. Since our project involves participants and data collection, we have to make sure everything is ethically sound—but waiting for approval has definitely slowed things down more than we expected. Another challenge is making sure our intervention actually works. The prediction market is a really cool idea, but the big question is: Will it actually improve climate literacy and change behavior? People might engage with it just for the incentives without really learning anything, so we’ve had to think hard about how to structure the market in a way that keeps people invested beyond just the financial rewards.
Any specific tips about working with your team’s community?
This question doesn’t really apply to us since we don’t work directly with a specific community, but one key thing we’ve had to keep in mind is ethical considerations before deploying our project. Since we’re working with tertiary students and collecting data on their climate literacy and behavior, we have to be really careful about privacy, consent, and ensuring there’s no unintended harm from the intervention.