19 December 2023CEE-M members took part on the 7th , 8th and 14th of October 2023 in the “Fête de la Science” in Montpellier and Dijon, organised this year on the theme of “Sports and Science”.The “Fête de la Science” is a national event organised each year by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research to allow all publics to discover the world of science and meet researchers – “.
The CEE-M’s participation in this event had two objectives. On the one hand, it enabled researchers to present behavioural and experimental economics to the general public and to explain how this branch of economics can help solve societal problems. On the other hand, it allowed data collection on the theme of competitive spirit for Noémie Bobin’s thesis
Raising public awareness on behavioural economics
The CEE-M exhibition stand featured three posters, each presenting a research problem : nudges, moral licensing and moral dilemna the methodology used to provide answers, and the main conclusions.
The aim of these posters was to catch the attention of visitors and engage them in a discussion with one of the members of the research centre present on the site.
(Click on the image to view the posters)
Data collection
Process
The science fair was an opportunity to ask visitors about their appetite for competition and to get them to take part in experimental games, possibly paid, to reveal their preferences and behaviour in different situations. Gabriel Bayle and Noémie Bobin, doctoral students at the CEE-M, designed the experimental protocol under the supervision of Dimitri Dubois and Marc Willinger.
The experiment began with a questionnaire, followed by a throw of 10 balls into a bucket placed 3 metres away.
The questionnaire collected socio-demographic information about the participants (gender, age, socio-professional category, etc.), together with their sport practice (regular or not, type of sport, etc.) and their appetite for competition.
The aim of the experimental games was to reveal the participants’ overconfidence bias and their appetite for competition. The main task of the experiment was to throw 10 balls into a bucket placed 3 metres away. Although this task was playful, the participants were asked to evaluate their expected performance beforehand, to benchmark themselves against other participants, and to ask them whether they preferred to be paid for this task on the basis of individual performance (“pay as you go” type of payment) or in comparison with the performance of other participants who had also chosen this competitive option(“Tournament” type ofpayment).
Almost 500 people took part in the experiment over the three days and on the two sites (Montpellier and Dijon),
Résults
In the video below, Noémie Bobin comments on the initial results from the data collected (in french)
Conclusion
Visitors particularly appreciated CEE-M’s research themes and its experimental methodology, both in the laboratory and in the field. Many discovered that economics is an experimental science.
For the CEE-M it was a unique opportunity to interact with visitors and to collect a large volume of data for scientific purposes.