Mission and Activities

 

The UM6P Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Making (CBED) unites local and international researchers who aim at empirically investigating economic behavior, be it at the individual or at the aggregate level, with an eye to the modern theoretical literature in Economics and Decision Theory. The center aspires at publishing empirical and theoretical research articles in internationally recognized journals in Economics and Management Sciences.

 

In addition to understanding the determinants of economic behavior in general settings, the center also aims at investigating economic behavior under uncertainty and over time in developing countries with the objective to provide policy makers and decision makers with tools that help building consistent courses of action.

 

Specifically, the center focuses on four main activities:

 

• Testing and understanding economic and decision theory models in a way that will allow to increase their predictive power.
• Investigating the causal determinants of preferences / beliefs and their effect on economic behavior.
• Developing efficient empirical methods to inform and influence public policies in developing countries.
• Providing decision makers (in both private and public organizations) with advanced tools to structure, model and resolve complex decision problems.

 

Research Expertise

 

• Behavioral determinants of economic behavior under uncertainty and over time.
• Belief formation, overconfidence, information and decision making.
• Behavioral development economics (e.g. risk taking in poor economic environments).

 

Data collection

 

The CBED combines the modeling and measurement of theoretically identified preferences with randomized controlled trials and quasi-experiments to further our understanding of economic decision making and aid policy making.

 

Data about economic behavior is collected by the means of laboratory experiments, field experiment, and survey studies.

 

LELAB: Local Experimental Laboratory facility

 

LELAB is located in the building devoted to the CBED. It has computers connected to a local server, and laptops that can be taken outside of the laboratory to conduct field experiments and surveys.

 

RISLab Africa: Risk, Insurance, and Savings Laboratory

 

RISLab  is an international research facility located in Ghent University (Belgium). RISLab  encompasses internationally recognized scholars from different disciplines with a common interest in behavioral economics and individual decision making, and the application of those interests to better understand behavior across a variety of contexts.

 

RISLab  collaborates with the CBED through its Regional Center, RISLab  Africa, located in UM6P, Morocco. The first joint research project of the two research facilities is entitled “The Determinants and Consequences of Preferences”.