Experiments

The research unit mostly works with data generated through laboratory experiments, designed by the researchers themselves. We share a laboratory for economic experiments which is located at the Technical University Berlin. It was founded in 2007 and is run in cooperation with the Chair of Macroeconomics (Prof. Frank Heinemann). The infrastructure of the laboratory consists of 25 work stations, two servers and a beamer. The work stations are separated in mobile cubicles and are equipped with state-of-the art software.

At the WZB, the unit also has a mobile lab consisting of 12+1 notebooks for participants and the experimenter. This allows for flexible operation, for instance, for demonstration purposes in class or small-scale field studies.

For the experiments, we mainly recruit students from all universities in Berlin. To facilitate the recruitment and the maintenance of the participant pool, we use ORSEE (Greiner 2004), a web-based recruiting data base. Currently we have more than 1600 participants from various fields of studies. Most lab experiments are conducted computerized using the experimental software toolbox z-Tree (Fischbacher 2007), but we also run internet experiments using PHP and mySQL.