Research Program
Interested Faculty:
Philip
Ganderton, David Brookshire, Kate Krause
The Experimental Economics research undertaken at UNM has been
largely directed toward complementing the major applied
microeconomics fields in the department. Current and recent
projects are:
i) Identification of the Incentives for the Limited Resource
Farmer to Adopt SCS Programs - funded by the USDA Soil
Conservation Service
ii)Army Training Bases and Endangered Species: An Experimental
Auction Approach to Habitat Acquisition - funded by the Army
Environmental Policy Institute
iii)Existence Values and Option Prices for Environmental Public Goods:
Laboratory Investigations - funded by the National Science Foundation
iv) Experimental Investigation of the EPA Emmissions Trading
Program - funded by the Electric Power Research Institute
v) Preference Formation and Elicitation in Valuing Non-Market
Goods - funded by the Environmental Protection Agency
vi) Evolving Entitlements and Intervening to Prevent a Collective
Harm - funded through internal funds at UNM
Most of these projects have involved graduate students as active
participants in the research activities. Some of these projects
have formed the basis for dissertation research.
Laboratory
The laboratory is housed within the Economics Department. One large room is a dedicated
research lab that is set up for the subject stations. This room contains 21 pentium III
personal computers located in individual carrels for privacy. Thus, the experimenter is
able to control which information is private and which is common knowledge. With one
station set aside for the experimenter, up to 20 subjects may be active in a market at any
given time.
The subject stations in the research laboratory are networked via two networks and the
experimenter may choose which one to use to conduct the experiments. One link is through
a dedicated MicroVAX housed in the control room of the laboratory. The MicroVAX runs the
software and serves as the central file server. All subject data are written to files on
the VAX. The MicroVAX has 16 mb of RAM and 600 mb of hard disk storage space. There is an
extensive suite of software that has been developed for conducting market experiments to
investigate a wide variety of institutions. Some recent work has included investigation of
tax compliance behavior, insurance purchase decisions in different settings, and private
provision of public goods.
A second link is available through a Novell Network. Each subject station is connected
via ethernet cards through a 586-class server with 32 Mb ram and 2.5Gb fixed storage
space. There is an extensive set of software developed for this system.
A third link is available through a Windows NT server. The subject stations running
Windows 95 are linked via an intranet running Netscape. Software is being developed in
Java which allows for investigation of complex decision making tasks using graphics and
photo images.
Having the dual capacity allows the lab to be configured in different ways and means
that software may be adapted from a variety of sources.
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