// live experiments & field materials
Experiments
All studies are built and deployed by me end-to-end — and two of them are playable right on this site.
oTree · Lab (Melbourne) & online (Prolific UK/AU)
Job Market Paper · Playable Demo
The Gold-Mining Game
Waiting for Gold: Delay, Anticipation & Valuation
A miner digs for gold on your behalf. While you wait, you solve brain teasers — and every time you click "See how the miner is doing", that click is data: checking has no instrumental value, so checking frequency and viewing time reveal anticipatory utility. Anticipation is measured primarily by an incentivized willingness to pay for early information, and the delay before the nugget's value is revealed is randomly assigned. The headline result: delays reduce valuations — but only for low-anticipation participants. High anticipators barely discount at all.
Co-authored · Playable Demo
The Comparative-Information Experiment
Who Wants to Know Where They Rank?
Participants solve pattern-matching puzzles, state incentivized beliefs about their absolute performance and their rank (a full five-interval distribution under a binarized scoring rule), and receive a deliberately noisy score. Then the key decision: which rank group would you pay to learn about — and how much? When the information has no instrumental value, women who believe themselves to be average performers avoid upward comparisons; facing the prospect of doing the task again, they seek them more than men. Revise & resubmit at the Journal of Economic Psychology.
Currently in the Field
AIT Life-Year Study — v1.3
Anticipatory Utility & Health Outcome Trade-Offs
Participants are placed in a simulated GP consultation and must choose between a certain life-year outcome (Standard Care) and a risky treatment (50/50 between a 5-year gain and a 5-year loss). A second between-subject factor varies whether the treatment outcome is revealed immediately or after a six-month delay. The design lets us separately identify hope (anticipation of the gain) and dread (anticipation of the loss) components of anticipatory utility, and how they interact with delay.
Click any task below to view the actual experiment page:
Recently Completed
AIT Life-Year Study — earlier waves
Pilot & Calibration Studies
Earlier waves established comprehension benchmarks, calibrated the WTP/WTA bisection procedure, and tested the GP consultation framing. Data from these waves informs the design choices in v1.3.
Behind the Scenes
Tech Stack
I treat experiment code as production software: version-controlled, ethics-cleared, instrumented for behavioural telemetry (response times, revisions, slider trajectories), and reproducible from raw data to final tables.
Experiment Engine
- oTree v5
- Custom JS / CSS
- Bisection / staircase procedures
- Attention & comprehension checks
Deployment
- Prolific (UK / AU)
- Heroku
- Server-side data logging
Analysis
- R (tidyverse, lme4)
- Stata
- Python (pandas)
- Reproducible pipelines
Quality
- Pre-registration (OSF)
- Power calculations
- Simulated data stress tests
- Manual pilot checklists