17 October 2014 Friends of CESS: As we start the new term I would like to review briefly the upcoming CESS events and news that may be of interest to the experimental research community at Oxford. To start with, I want to encourage students and staff to take advantage of the excellent experimental facilities here at CESS. We have a great team here to help you implement stateof-the-art experimental research. And just to remind you, last year we have significantly reduced the costs of conducting experiments at CESS. Moreover, for some departments there are funds available to assist with student experimental projects. John Jensenius who is the Assistant to the CESS Director is responsible in particular for the management of the CESS lab. He should be your first contact if you are considering a lab experiment at CESS. CESS also provides full support for online experiments – we can provide access to crowdsourced subjects (such as Amazon Mechanical Turk), the CESS Online, or commercial internet panels. The CESS Online (http://cess.nuff.ox.ac.uk/cess-online) is an online opt-in panel started in October 2013. CESS has been recruiting people from allover the UK through online advertisement, and the total signups have reached 700. Aki Matsuo who is a research officer at CESS is responsible for implementing these online experiments and helping with their design. You can reach John and Aki at [email protected]. CESS has also been active in the non-academic sector. At the end of September, CESS hosted Oxera, an economic consulting firm, on a team building exercise. Members of Oxera’s competition team had the opportunity to participate in two demonstration experiments, learning about the value of experiments in research, as well as learning a bit about each other. Additionally, CESS has agreed to take part in a project for the U.K. Department of Work and Pensions. The experiments for this project will occur later this academic year. As part of its efforts to support “excellent research in academia” Google Inc. has awarded CESS with a Faculty Research Award, which provides funding for a research project to develop and explore innovative methods for implementing rigorous behavioral experiments and surveys on the Internet using different online platforms. CESS is in the process of hiring a candidate to execute this project. CESS continues to host prominent experimentalists from all social science disciplines as visiting scholars. In the 2014-2015 academic year the following scholars will be visiting CESS: Jeffrey P. Carpenter (Professor of Political Economy at Middlebury College), Catherine Hafer and Dimitri Landa (Associate Professors at the Department of Politics, New York University), John T. Gasper (Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Economy and Business Administration, Carnegie Mellon University), and Jaimie W. Lien (Assistant Professor, School of Economics and Management Tsinghua University). CESS now is actively searching for visiting scholar candidates who would like to spend time at CESS to pursue their research projects and collaborate with experimental social scientists in Oxford. Those who are interested in visiting can find detailed information at http://cess-web.nuff.ox.ac.uk/visitors/. This term we have assembled a great line-up of seminar speakers. Ozan Aksoy, a Research Fellow in Experimental Social Sciences at CESS, is responsible for the CESS Seminar Series. You can contact Ozan at the following e-mail: [email protected]. Our CESS seminars take place at 5:00 pm, often either on Tuesday or Wednesday. They are followed by drinks in the Nuffield JCR. The Trinity Term speakers are the following: Oct 22 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Butler Room Jeffrey Carpenter (Middlebury College) “Progressive Taxation in a Tournament Economy” Nov 12 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Butler Room Björn Bartling (U Zurich) “Do Markets Erode Social Responsibility?” Nov 19 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Butler Room Steven Callander (GSB Stanford) “Optimal Search over Rugged Landscapes” Nov 26 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Large Lecture Room Colin Camerer (Caltech) “Experiments in dynamic unstructured bargaining with private information and deadlines” Dec 4 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Clay Room Shanto Iyengar (Stanford) “Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization” As part of our effort to help researchers with the design and implementation of their experimental projects, CESS conducts a regular afternoon colloquia where students and staff can present their preliminary research designs. The colloquium series is also organized by Ozan Aksoy. These colloquia are attended by many of the senior experimentalists at the University of Oxford and hence are an excellent opportunity to get valuable feedback on new experimental projects. We particularly encourage students to participate in these colloquia. For those interested please contact Ozan. Currently we have the following colloquia scheduled: Oct 21 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm, Clay Room Amrish Patel (U Gothenburg) “Reciprocity Networks and the Participation Problem” Oct 28 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm, CESS Seminar Room Ozan Aksoy (University of Oxford) “Equal but diverse or unequal but unified: Effects of inequality and diversity on generalized cooperation and trust (An experimental design)” Nov 11 @ 1:00 pm-2:00 pm, CESS seminar room Peiran Jiao (University of Oxford) "Investors' reinforcement learning" On Thursday 27 November 2014, CESS will organize an orientation workshop. The orientation is designed to highlight the range of research questions that can be addressed with experimental methods and to inform prospective experimentalists about how CESS can assist them in designing and implementing experimental projects. The orientation targets all University of Oxford faculty, post-docs, and students. In particular, we are interested in reaching those who have had little experience in conducting experiments but either have experimental projects they would like to implement or are thinking about using experiments as part of their research. During the workshop the CESS team and prominent visiting scholars will present examples of successful lab, online, and field experiments. We will also discuss the details of conducting experimental research at CESS. All of CESS events and facilities are open to the scholarly community although some of them will have fees – please consult our web page for details. If you have any questions about CESS events or conducting experiments at CESS please contact any one of us. Sincerely, Ray Duch Director, CESS [email protected]
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