Special issue published on developing countries

The Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (JEBO) has published a special issue which aims to show how lab experimental methods can be applied in developing countries.

16.10.2015 - Ed.

The Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (JEBO) has published a special issue called "Economic Experiments in the Lab and in the Field in Developing Countries". It originates from the fourth Symposium on Economic Experiments in Developing Countries (SEEDEC), which was hosted by The Choice Lab at NHH in December 2013 in collaboration with X-Lab and Center for Effective Global Actions (CEGA) at University of California Berkeley.

The aim of the special issue is to show how lab experimental methods can be applied in developing countries to shed light on a wide range of issues and contribute to new important insights in economics.

The papers cover a wide range of topics in experimental and behavioral economics. They study motivation for giving and pro-social behavior, inequality acceptance and fairness, cooperative behavior, risk preferences and poverty traps, the determinants of time preferences and competitiveness preferences, loss aversion, the importance of networks, the role of social context in shaping individual behavior, racial identity, gender differences in preferences, and the external validity of lab experimental behavior. Equally important, the papers point at a number of important unresolved research questions, and the special issue will therefore hopefully inspire new important research in this field.

Researchers from The Choice Lab have contributed with two papers for the special issue: "Disabled by stereotype? Experimental evidence from Uganda", written by Kjetil Bjorvatn and Bertil Tungodden, and "Competitive in the lab, successful in the field?", which is a project by Lars Ivar Oppedal Berge, Kjetil Bjorvatn, Armando Jose Garcia Pires and Bertil Tungodden.

NHH Professor Bertil Tungodden is a guest editor of the issue.

Bertil Tungodden, Kjetil Bjorvatn, Lars Ivar Oppedal Berge and Armando Jose Garcia Pires