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About Ceel

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Mission

The experimental program of the CEEL is aimed at contributing through laboratory experimental methodologies to the understanding of how human cognition affects economic behavior. It is an interdisciplinary program, involving scientific competences from economics, cognitive psychology and business research. The experimental program interacts with the computer modelling program at CEEL.

The experimental program is also aimed at developing research training opportunities through workshops, research grants and connections with national and international PhD programs. Furthermore, the CEEL is committed to developing software tools for the larger experimental community in social sciences.

Finally, the experimental research program is concerned with the transfer of experimental results to the design of economic institutions and to organizational policies.

Research areas

Learning

Since 1991, researchers at CEEL have been experimentally investigating processes of learning. The study of collective learning still constitutes the core experimental competence of the CEEL.
A major line of research concerns organizational learning and the routinization of choice in coordination tasks.

The experimental program is designed to explore the cognitive aspects of collective learning. Current experimental projects involve the study of the effects of conflicting incentives in learning, learning and risk aversion, and levels of abstraction in learning coordination tasks.

A parallel line of research on learning involves experiments on:

• learning
• tax evasion
• risk adversion

Representation and choice

This second line of research explores how mental representations affect choice processes. Three sub-projects are currently being undertaken

a) Categorization and bias
b) Mental models in games
c) Mental models and choice under uncertainty

Choice without utility

A more recent research project of the CEEL, still under development, is aimed at exploring some implications of an axiomatic model of choice without utility, the benchmarking model, identifying opportunities for unified explanations of different choice biases that still lack a coherent conceptualization.

Applications

Besides these main areas of theoretical investigation, the CEEL is actively conducing research on applied reserach areas, where the core

CMC
Tax evasion
Incentives
Consumer behavior

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Department of Economics and Management via Inama, 5 I-38100 Trento tel. +39 461 282100