行動・実験経済学研究会

April 28th (Tuesday), 5th period (17:00–18:30)

Speaker: Josie Chen

Title of talk: Mind-Reading Ability Predicts Sales Performance: Evidence from Financial Consultants

Language: English

Type of talk: Research Presentation

Abstract: We develop a novel task to measure individuals’ ability to read others’ minds in the ultimatum game and apply it in an artefactual field experiment involving 98 financial consultants from a Taiwanese commercial bank. We then link this measure of mind-reading ability to administrative data on consultants’ sales performance over the past year. Our results reveal a strong and robust association between mind-reading ability and sales performance, even after controlling for a rich set of individual characteristics. This study provides a new, objective, and quantifiable approach to measuring a key social cognition skill that is fundamental to many economically strategic interactions. 

May 19th (Tuesday), 5th period (17:00–18:30)

Speaker: Tang Ruiqi (Graduate School of Economics, Waseda University) 

Title of talk: AI Participants in Experiments 

Type of talk: Reading Presentation 

Language: English 

Abstract: Social and behavioral scientists increasingly aim to study how humans interact, collaborate, and make decisions alongside artificial intelligence. However, the experimental infrastructure for such work remains underdeveloped: (1) few platforms support real-time, multi-party studies at scale; (2) most deployments require bespoke engineering, limiting replicability and accessibility, and (3) existing tools do not treat AI agents as first-class participants. We present Deliberate Lab, an open-source platform for large-scale, real-time behavioral experiments that supports both human participants and large language model (LLM)-based agents. We report on a 12-month public deployment of the platform (N=88 experimenters, N=9195 experiment participants), analyzing usage patterns and workflows. Case studies and usage scenarios are aggregated from platform users, complemented by in-depth interviews with select experimenters. By lowering technical barriers and standardizing support for hybrid human-AI experimentation, Deliberate Lab expands the methodological repertoire for studying collective decision-making and human-centered AI. 

The paper is available via: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13011 

The platform is available at: https://deliberate-lab.appspot.com/ 

June 16th (Tuesday), 5th period (17:00–18:30)

Speaker: Ayato Kitadai 

Title of talk: AI as Part of Mechanism Design: Evidence from Laboratory Experiments 

Type of talk: Research Presentation

Language: English

Abstract: Generative AI is increasingly used to mediate how institutions communicate with participants, yet its implications for mechanism design remain underexplored. This talk presents evidence from two laboratory experiments that examine AI-mediated communication and explanation as components of mechanism implementation. The first study investigates how different forms of AI-mediated institutional communication affect extraction behavior in a dynamic common-pool-resource game. The second study examines how an AI tool designed to support participants’ understanding of a matching mechanism affects rank-order submissions under Deferred Acceptance and Reverse Deferred Acceptance. Across the two studies, the findings suggest that AI-mediated interfaces can meaningfully alter behavior in strategic environments, but not always in uniformly beneficial or neutral ways. These results highlight the need to treat AI-mediated communication and explanation tools as integral design components of mechanisms. 

July 14th (Tuesday), 5th period (17:00–18:30)

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Title of talk: Coming Soon...

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