The Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics & Professor Kevin McCabe
Through the generous support of IFREE, the Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics (CSN), led by Dr. Kevin McCabe, was able to run two important and very successful summer programs: the Summer Intern and Fellow Program and the High School Summer Workshop, both focusing on Virtual World experimental economics.
CSN promotes the notion that Economics can best be studied by understanding the emergent computations that are made by people working in groups with defined interests and who are voluntarily constrained and coordinated by institutional rules. By running experiments, we can study these computations in controlled and replicable settings. Virtual world experiments allow us to see how these computations emerge within a natural environment of social discourse.
This summer CSN hosted three graduate fellows and four undergraduate interns who worked closely on aspects of experimental design: running experiments, analyzing experimental data, and learning how to design and program objects in a virtual world. Together with Professor McCabe, fellows and interns attended skills workshops where they discussed and practiced new experimental economics skills. Two of the interns built an “avatar” training facility where newcomers can learn virtual world skills. Another intern built and documented a demonstration trust experiment, which serves to acquaint others with all the information they will need to know in order to program their own virtual world experiment. The goal of CSN is to create an open source library of these objects to be freely available to anyone who wants to run such experiments.
The Summer Internship Program was also designed to provide interns with leadership skills. Participants were instrumental in the implementation of the High School Workshop on Virtual World Experiments. Fifteen exceptional high school students from four local high schools divided into four main teams to work together in order to design and build a virtual world experiment in just one week. CSN interns were team mentors for high school workshop participants. Their job was not to lead the team, but instead, to facilitate their learning experience and be a resource to answer questions about economics or provide technical support. The High School Workshop was very exciting and challenging, with morning lectures on incentivized economics experiments and afternoon group projects on programming techniques in the virtual world.