Three essays in Experimental Economics

Abstract

The goal of Experimental Economics is to study the process of decision-making. It does so by presenting problems to subjects and studying their answers. One aspect neglected by standard experimental design is the importance of the visual aspect in the decision-making process. The goal of this thesis is to introduces visualization in the design of economic tasks. Traditional experimental designs present to subjects a problem in the form of texts and numbers. This methodological approach allows to minimize the number of potential confounding factors influencing decision-making. It therefore allows to study the potential influence of an unique factor. But it also has the drawback of immersing subjects in a different context than daily lives, with the main difference being the importance given to what individuals are seeing in modern environments. Our lives are indeed dominated by the visual aspect. We use sight to situate ourselves in the geographical space, identify how to manipulate objects or decode our interactions with others. The signature of modern society is to optimize the visual experience, since technological progress allowed to design objects beyond their function. This dominance of our existences to the category of sight justifies reflecting on how to introduce it as a standard method in experimental designs. The methodological step forward of will be done by building an experiment in which the visual aspect drives the process of decision-making. We will then investigate the topic of online environments by showing that it produces similar results than the laboratory environment. It is important for visual experiments because online environments provide a promising avenue to run this type of experiment. Finally, we will further validate visual experiments by showing their ability to successfully collect datas with the difficult population of teenagers in a large scale experiment.