ECM653 Essay Assignment (50%)
For the academic year 2024-25
• Submission deadline: 06/06/2025 (12 noon)
• Pre-submission: 20/05/2025
• Turnitin submission through Blackboard.
This assignment requires you to design an experiment, collect your own data, analyse the same and write a report based on it. Please find the specific guidelines below.
Design an experiment
Find a behavioural research question that interests you. The research question should not be too complicated and should be answerable with an experiment. It can be related to a topic that has been covered in the lecture – e.g., endowment effect, mental accounting, charitable giving and warm glow, choice over lotteries, time preference – or something else.
Your experimental design should meet the following criteria.
- Up to a maximum of 4 treatments including Control.
- Can be designed from scratch or can be modified from an existing experimental design with due citation. If you choose to use a modified design, you should be able to clearly explain the ways in which you have modified it and why, i.e., what does your modified design allow you to study that could not be or wasn’t addressed in the original study.
- It can be a choice experiment or it may be based on some simple economic game.
- The experiment should involve at least one of the listed methods, either within the main treatment task or as a post-experimental control: BDM mechanism to extract WTP or WTA, risk elicitation, belief elicitation, elicitation of social preferences, priming, some standard psychological inventory.
- You should also collect some demographic information from your subjects. Collect data
You can run the experiment physically (getting your participants play in front of you) or online. If you choose to run it online, you may design your interface using Qualtrics, Google/Microsoft form, oTree, HTML (if you know) or any other method that is suitable to your purpose.
The following criteria should be met:
- You should have at least 30 participants unless it’s a repeated measure experiment.
- You should aim for at least 10 participants in each treatment, regardless of the number of your treatments.
- All your classmates and the lecturer must be allowed/invited to participate.
- The experiment should last between 10-30 minutes, on average.
- You cannot offer real incentive to your participants. But give some kind of virtual incentives (e.g., stars or points).
- You need to submit your raw data as part of your final submission.
Analysis and Report
You can analyse your data using Stata, R, Python, Excel, or any other statistical tool you are comfortable with. You must submit your script/codes as part of your final submission.
Write a report
Your final report should have the following structure:
- Introduction: State your research objective and motivate your question with real world examples or evidence from the experimental literature. Clearly state your research questions and hypotheses (if any).
- Brief literature: Briefly discuss a few important studies related to your particular research question and contrast and compare your own research question. You may also refer to seminal studies in the broad topic if relevant.
- Experimental design: Describe the experimental design in detail with due reference to other studies that may have helped certain elements in your design.
- Experimental implementation: How you collected your data? How many participants? How were they randomized between treatments? How long did the experiment last?
- Results: Report your results clearly addressing the research question. Report descriptive statistics. If you have more than one question/hypothesis, put the related results into different subsections.
- Conclusion: Conclude and indicate any possible limitation.
- Bibliography: List your references using any standard reference style (Harvard / APA / Cambridge)
- Word count: Up to 5000 excluding bibliography.