The Open Research Centre WWW Site

Division of Economics, Graduate School
Kyoto Sangyo University, Kyoto, Japan

Experimental Economics:

Who learns what from economic experiments?

(This project is selected as an Open Research Centre by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology, FY2006 - FY2008)

In the last 5 years (2001-2005), we have been working on the project, "Experimental Economics: A new method of teaching economics and the research on its impact on society." Because of our past efforts for this project, we have fortunately been approved to extend our project from 2006 to 2008. We will further develop our research agenda focusing on experimental economics, economics education, and neuroeconomics to train researchers in those fields.

In the past project, we established our laboratory KEEL (Kyoto Experimental Economics Laboratory) in March, 2002. Since then, we have conducted a variety of experiments with many researchers in various research fields. The outcomes of those studies have been presented at many conferences and published in journals. In December, 2004, we invited Nobel laureate, Vernon Smith and other leading researchers to our first international conference, "Experiments in Economic Sciences: New Approaches to Solving Real-world Problems."

In the new project, we will develop educational material for teaching economics through experiments. We think that it is important for students not only to join experiments as subjects but also to design and run experiments by themselves. In addition to that, we will train our students how to analyze the data that they collected from their experiments. These new programs are all based on our past experiences in academic studies on experimental research and economics education using experiments.

Our new goal is now to understand the behavior of homo economicus by observing how human brains function when they face economic decisions. Neuroeconomics is our new focus. Our research questions for this new approach are based on the accumulation of our previous research project. We especially feel the necessity to combine "learning and reasoning within the system" and "learning and reasoning about the system."

Considering the future importance of experimental economics and neuroeconomics, we would like our open and interdisciplinary research organization to contribute by training many researchers in these fields in Japan.