Experimental Economics Excursion

Year 11 Economics Excursion to Monash Laboratory of Experimental Economics 

On Friday 17 March, students in Year 11 Economics were treated to a free workshop program offered by the Monash Laboratory of Experimental Economics (MonLEE). 

The day started with an overview of the offerings at Monash University, including examples of student & academic life, degree and double degree prerequisites and options, and Industry based learning and work experience opportunities available.  Afterwards the staff led a discussion on examples of behavioural research they were undertaking followed by Q and A.

Students were then divided into three groups to take part in a series of workshops for the rest of the day. This included:

• A coding workshop where students undertook a behavioural experiment in a computer lab that through a collaborative game explored levels of social responsibility vs self-interest, then were showed how to design and code their own;

• A design workshop where students were guided on how to come up with a research question, behavioural experiment design and the constraints they had to work with;

• A VR game experiment workshop where students had to make economic choices on costs on various widths of planks to walk on over the edge of a building in order to reach money on the other side with the goal of holding the highest amount at the end of the game. The idea of the experiment was to explore how people might assess risk and reward in making economic decisions.

After a picnic lunch provided courtesy of MonLEE, students took part in a series of Behavioural Economics games such as the Keynesian Beauty Contest and the Travelers dilemma, before completing more workshop rotations. At the end of the day a group photo was taken before we thanked and farewelled the MonLEE team for providing a fun and educational day. 

~ Mr Lee