This syllabus is preliminary and subject to change.

Contact & Admin Details

Pre-requisites for Behavioral Economics

ECO254 requires you to have completed ECO250 and ECO220/MTH220. You need to have completed the courses for at least some of the following reasons:

As calculus is a pre-requisite for ECO250, I shall assume that you are comfortable with calculus and algebra.

Game theory (with Prof Miller or while abroad) is a recommended course to have taken, but not a pre-requisite.

You need to have access to a laptop/notebook for this course. We will use them every Thursday either for experiments or data analysis in R. If you need access to one, let me know and we shall do our best to organize one with ETS.

Learning Goals

I separate learning goals into goals with different verbs: know, understand, comprehend, analyze, synthesize, do, etc.

Course Surveys

Please make sure you complete these surveys by the end of the first week of term.

Method of Instruction

The course is a lecture-based course with “labs” and a substantial amount of student participation and teamwork. Students are expected to prepare the chapter readings for each session and to be able to answer questions about the readings to produce a high quality discussion. Each student is expected to contribute to the discussion. If you do not contribute, I shall encourage you to do so. If you contribute substantially more than anyone else, then I may ask you rather to encourage the engagement of others. We will also employ peer evaluation, though the professor will award grades.

Texts

Copies of the required texts are (or will be) available in the Smith Bookstore and are (or will be) on reserve at Neilson Library. The supplementary texts will have copies on reserve at Neilson Library (don’t buy them unless you really, really want to).

Required text

Recommended

I would strongly recommend that you buy & read this book in the first two weeks of the course. I only found out it was available after book orders were due, which is why it’s not prescribed, but I would prescribe it otherwise.

Supplementary

We use three supplementary texts in the course. They are all available free of charge online through Moodle.

  1. Bowles, Foley and Halliday (forthcoming) is a text in intermediate microeconomics that you can use to revise.
  2. Plott (2007) is for understanding the basics of different experimental designs.
  3. Grolemund and Wickham (2016) is to supplement the work you do in basic data science toward replicating and producing your own statistical results.

If you’d like a hard copy book, then get one of these two:

Datacamp

We shall use DataCamp for this course for you to do exercises and learn the basics of R. We shall occasionally do exercises together during Thursday classes, or I will expect you to do Datacamp exercises or in-class exercises for homework.

Be sure to do the following:

  1. If you do not have one, create a LinkedIn account with your Smith (or Five-college) email address (please be sure to use your .edu email address - you can add other ones later).
  2. Create an account at Datacamp.com connected to your LinkedIn account.
  3. I will add you to the course on Datacamp.com and you will be able to complete exercises that synchronize with your LinkedIn account.

Note: This is the first time I shall use DataCamp for a course I am teaching. If there are issues getting started with it, I apologize, but such niggles occur when trying to innovate.

Course Schedule

Below is a tentative and preliminary course schedule. It is subject to change depending on what happens during the semester.

Date Week Topic Reading Lab/Experiment Assignment
9/7 Week 1 Intro BE Ch. 1 - -
9/12-14 Week 2 Heuristics BE Ch. 2 Experiment & Lab 0
9/19-21 Week 3 Risk BE Ch. 3 Lab 1 ER1
9/26-28 Week 4 Risk BE Ch. 3 Experiment -
10/3-10/5 Week 5 Time BE Ch. 4 Lab 2 ER2
10/7-10/10 - Fall Break - - -
10/12 Week 6 Learning & Info BE Ch. 5 Lab 3 -
10/17-10/19 Week 7 Learning & Info BE Ch. 5 & S. 6.4 Experiment/Lab -
10/24-10/26 Week 8 Social Preferences BE Ch. 7 Lab 4 ER3 (T); Prop Pres (Th)
10/31 Week 9 Social Preferences BE Ch. 7 Lab 5 Prop Pres (T)
11/02 - Otelia Cromwell Day - - -
11/7-9 Week 10 Social Preferences BE Ch. 7 Lab 6 Midterm
11/14-16 Week 11 Gender Readings Experiment/Lab -
11/21 Week 12 Happiness & Utility BE Ch. 10 Lab 7 ER4
11/22-26 - Thanksgiving Break - - -
11/28-30 Week 13 Policy BE Ch. 11 Lab 8 -
11/5-7 Week 14 Policy BE Ch. 11 Lab 9 -
12/12-14 Week 15 Final Presentations - -
12/15-18 - Study Period - - -
12/21 - Project Due Date - - -

Assessment

The following table summarizes the different aspects of the course’s assessment.

Assessment Percentage Cumulative
Class Participation 10% 10%
In-class presentations 10% 20%
Take-home Midterm 25% 45%
Proposal Presentation 5% 50%
Team Project 25% 75%
Final Presentation 5% 80%
Experiment Reports 10% 90%
Lab exercises 10% 100%

In-class Experiments

We will use VEconLab to run in-class experiments, typically during the Thursday class-times. I’m also investigating two alternative platforms: MobLab and economics-games.

Moodle & Website

In general, I will use my site, simondhalliday.com/behavioral for content for ECO254. We also have a moodle site where I will put copies of files that we use in the course and where you will need to upload your assignments. I’ll explain why I use my website as a resource.

Guideline Questions to Think About Your Team Research Project

Each member of the class will participate in a team to research a project. In doing so, you will need to think about a research experiment you would like to do (assume you had the funds and other resources to do so). It would be useful for you to write down answers to the following questions, and then iterate by revising your answers as you think about each question, discuss it with your team members, your other colleagues and the instructor. Send me your write up at any stage you wish, and feel free to come and talk to me about it.

  1. What is the question you would like to have answered after the experiment? (Your answer should be a single sentence with a question mark at the end.)
  2. What do you know already about the possible answers to the question you have stated above?
  3. What are the various possible ways of finding an answer to the question you have stated above? Include both experimental and other methods you can think of.
  4. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using an experiment to find an answer?
  5. How important is this question to YOU? What are the chances that the answer you get from the experiment will surprise you or others? What are the chances that it will change someone’s mind?
  6. How would you conduct the experiment? (Write down a design and develop instructions.)
  7. Is your experimental design the simplest possible design to help answer the question you have stated?
  8. What are the possible outcomes of the experiment? Do the possible outcomes include at least one outcome that will answer the question you stated above? What is the chance that you will observe this outcome?

At any stage of your thinking, feel free to go back and revise your earlier answers if you wish to.

Team Formation

I will put you into teams. I will take your answers to the course survey about your backgrounds – your majors, the courses you’ve taken, etc – to design teams with diverse backgrounds and capabilities. As this is an upper-level course, all of you should have taken the pre-reqs, but the extra courses you’ve taken will help to improve the diversity of perspectives in your teams. I would recommend that you assign each person in your team a role and either hold roles constant for the semester or occasionally rotate roles to expose people to different tasks.

Integrity in Empirical Research for your Team

When you set up a project, you will need to follow the TIER protocol. The draft protocol for R is available here: tier_protocol_r. Read it carefully and be sure that you know how to follow the protocol. Set up your project in a Google drive or Dropbox folder that follows the steps in the protocol. I shall also upload a folder on Moodle that provides a (somewhat updated) folder structure that we’ve agreed on since writing this initial draft. Also check the updated version online at the Project Tier Site.

Team Project Deadlines

You have a few deadlines that I have imposed on your Team Research Project.

I would suggest that you consider imposing deadlines within your team which you write up as a contract which all your team members agree to and sign. Provide me with a scan/photo of the agreement and submit parts of the project as the semester proceeds. You can amend the contract if everyone votes and agrees (send me a copy of the amendment). If you don’t vote to amend, then someone may fail to meet their contractual obligations. This happens all the time in teams, so please also be forgiving, but also let me know if this happens repeatedly and a group member does not do their agreed tasks.

Team member evaluations

At the middle and end of the semester, you will evaluate each of your fellow team members in the following way. You will receive exactly these instructions on Moodle. For the mid-semester assessment, you will receive the feedback comments from others. For the final assessment, only I will read the comments.

“Evaluate the contributions of each person in your group except yourself, by distributing 100 points among them (that is, when you are done, the total points assigned to everyone should sum up to 100). You must provide comments for each person. These comments – but not who provided them – will be passed onto your teammates. Your score should reflect your judgment of such things as:

It is important that you differentiate between people who truly worked hard for the good of the group and those you perceived not to be working as hard on group tasks

(NOTE: If you give everyone pretty much the same score when it is not truly deserved, you will be hurting those who did the most and helping those who did the least)."

You can access the evaluation forms here:

Stats Prep & Spinelli Center

In the first week of ECO254, you will need to complete a knowledge survey on Moodle. Please access the knowledge survey through Moodle.

Ms. Maria Delfin-Auza is the statistics consultant at the Spinelli Center. She has a BA in Economics and a BA in Math & Stats. She can coach you on the use of Excel, Stata and R.

Revising and Learning Statistics

There are many resources online for learning or revising statistics.

Excel, Stata and R

During the course we will use R to do statistical analysis and produce graphics. R is rated among the top ten most useful programming languages and is growing in use. See for example, this blogpost: www.r-bloggers.com/r-6-in-ieee-2015-top-programming-languages-rising-3-places/

We need to do statistical analysis in the course, so you will learn about tidy data, the grammar of graphics and the basics of statistical analysis building on the theoretical knowledge you should have from ECO220 or MTH220. If you prefer to use Stata you are welcome to, but R is becoming more commonplace and there is more support for its use at Smith. Also, R and RStudio are free so you can access R using RStudio on your own computer. In contrast, Stata is costly and either the college or you yourself will have to pay for R.

We will use Microsoft Excel as a spreadsheet package for this course. You should also be able to use Google Docs as an alternative. I do not recommend MacOS Numbers: it is strictly inferior to both these alternatives. MS Excel is used in a variety of business, banking and accounting settings and I strongly advise you to improve your knowledge of the software. The main use of Excel will be to prepare data for use in R by exporting the data to a csv file. So you know, the following constitutes a non-exhaustive list of the functions I expect you ought to know how to use in Excel for the workplace, but which I shan’t go into myself in this course. corr, cov, sum, count, if, sumif, countif, concatenate, stddev, index, match, vlookup. (Maria will go through many of these in the Excel Workshop.)

For Help with Excel, Stata or R, I suggest you go to the following links:

Important Make sure you can save an Excel file as a comma separated value (.csv) file so that you can import it easily into either Stata (using the command insheet) or R (using the commands read.csv or read.table). To get help in Stata you can type in help followed by the command’s name e.g. help insheet. To get help in R you can type in ? followed by the command’s name, e.g. ?read.csv.

TIP If you want to import Stata data (a .dta file) into R, you should use the haven package.

Style Guides

When doing statistical work, it is imperative that you adopt a good style when presenting your work. I recommend that you use a style guide.

For R Scripts:

Hadley Wickham has a brief and useful style guide. Google has a very comprehensive style guide for its employees who use R, Google’s R Style Guide

Reproducibility and Integrity in Research

In ECO254, we shall do our best to follow the norms of the Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research (TIER) project in conjunction with the Open Science Framework (OSF).

Quantitative Literacy/Quantitative Reasoning

“Economics is an empirically oriented discipline. The focus is on explaining and testing our understanding of economic phenomena. Hence, students need an appreciation for an ability to deal with empirical matters.” Siegfried et al 1991, p.216

“The foundation in empirical methods depends on (1) knowing something about the measurement of economic variables (methods of data collection, reliability, etc.); (2) being able to organize, work with, and manipulate data for purposes of comparison; (3) the capacity to test hypotheses with empirical data; and (4) knowing how to interpret the results of various statistical procedures. The quantitative methods course should be reoriented from its almost singular statistical focus to emphasize this wider range of quantitative methods employed by economics.”(ibid. p.216)

I will do my best to help you become more quantitatively literate and to help you to become better applied social scientists in your study of behavioral economics.

Stats Tutors

Sunday through Thursday nights 7-9pm in Burton 301 there are statistics tutors who are there to help students in MTH/SDS220. But, they can also help you out with using R. You can find out more on the Spinelli Center Website: www.smith.edu/qlc/tutoring.html#S2.

Piazza, Questions & Email

In ECO254 we will use Piazza. Piazza is a website that allows participants to post questions (with their names or anonymously). You can respond to questions other people ask and they can respond to questions you ask. I can also endorse, comment on and add feedback to questions. I strongly encourage you to assist each other online (and preferably to do so with your names) so that I can see if and when you understand or do not understand an idea. Using Piazza also helps to ensure that I do not receive many emails asking the same question (which has happened in the past). If you email me about something already covered on Piazza, I will direct you to Piazza. I will add you all to the Piazza course after which you will receive an email alert and need to create a log-in for Piazza. Many of you probably already have such a log-in (I hope you remember your passwords).

All of which said, please feel free to email me. Typically, if an email is not about course content (which should almost always go on Piazza), then the email will be about something that is particularly relevant to you personally, e.g. you are traveling and will miss class, you need an extension for an assignment, you have a physical or mental health issue that needs to be resolved, etc. I shall always do my best to accommodate you. That said, I receive many, many emails. I try to ensure I get back to you within 24 hours (during the business week) or by Monday (if you emailed over the weekend). Occasionally, I may miss an email because of reading it on my phone and forgetting to mark it as unread to respond to it later. I apologize in advance if this happens.

Some notes on our goals and our learning

Acknowledgments

In developing this syllabus, I have drawn on resources from variety of people: Jennifer Imazeki, John Spraggon, Shyam Sunder, Daniel Kaplan, Richard Ball, Steve Weber, Galen Panger, and others who I probably don’t realize I pilfered from. Thanks to all of you.