Betting is Believing

A framework for experiments in cognitive and behavioral social science

Currently, only one experiment is supported, which is described in a chapter of my dissertation. Now, We are seeking funding and collaborators to greatly extend this project. Already, several extensions and rebuilds are trivial. What we seek to accomplish is a fully open source platform, where experimenters can effortlessly build their cognitive or behavioral experiments within their browsers, by dragging and dropping buttons, sliders and message boxes and by specifying the strategic interactions between players and their joint-payoff structures. This framework, allows researchers to effortlessly embed their experiments in natural occurring social structures over the Internet. The platform is efficient and flexible. Experiments can be carried out in the lab or over the web through a wide variety of platforms including Facebook and MTurk. You can choose your sample or let it evolve organically over social networks.

I want to thank the National Science Foundation for its generous funding of my dissertation, through its Graduate Research Fellowship. This work was part of my (Johannes Castner's) dissertation.

Kelvin Shi has worked with me on this project from the beginning and he is a non-academic co-author of this project.

Software inspirations for the project:

The general idea was inspired by z-Tree Zurich Toolbox for Ready-made Economic Experiments (Fischbacher, 2002).