On January 10-12, 2019 the Rosario Experimental and Behavioral Economics Lab (REBEL) hosted the Bogotá Experimental Economics Conference (BEEC) for the second time. Thanks to IFREE’s generous support, we were able to extend the conference and increase the number of presentations.
Objective
The main objective of this conference has been to bring together researchers from Latin America using experimental methods, so that they can interact and learn about each other’s research agendas. We are trying to strengthen the Latin American network by bringing opportunities to young scholars, so that they can meet and interact with researchers from elsewhere in the region and the world.
Keynote Speakers
The keynote speakers invited to the Bogota Experimental Economics Conference were Andrew Schotter (New York University), Leeat Yariv (Princeton University), and James Andreoni (University of California, San Diego). In addition to the three keynote talks, this year we had 20 presentations and over 30 attendees. Conference presenters came from institutions based in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, United States, United Arab Emirates, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, Germany and Canada. While Latin American may seem under-represented, 60% of the presenters are originally from Latin American countries (Colombia, Argentina, Perú, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Ecuador) and some of them conduct their research in the region as well.
Graduate poster session
In addition to participant presentations, we hosted again the graduate student poster session. The poster session allowed us to give graduate students and young researchers the opportunity to present their research in a more open and relaxed atmosphere, while keeping the rejection rate of the conference relatively low. This year we had nine poster presentations. All poster presenters had a 90-second poster pitch space during the conference to introduce their research idea and results to invite conference attendants to see their posters.
Workshop
The purpose of the workshop was to provide hands-on training in tools that contribute to open and transparent empirical methods of experimental research. The workshop was aimed at graduate students and young academics interested in experimental methods in the social sciences. This year, the workshop had 40 participants (young researchers and professors) from institutions based in Colombia (including scholars from cities like Barranquilla and Bucaramanga), Perú, Chile, Brasil, Austria and Germany.
Topics
The topics of this year’s workshop were Experimetrics (the econometric analysis of experimental data), and Replicability and Transparency in social science experiments. Professor Peter Moffat, author of the book Experimetrics, directed the first part of the workshop. In addition, a team of catalysts from the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in Social Science (BITSS) led the module on methods to improve openness, transparency and replicability in experimental economics research. The format of the workshop was heavily concentrated on new methodological tools in experimental economics.
