About DECIDE

Laboratory experiments under controlled conditions with paid participants are a key part of research into human decision-making across a range of social sciences including economics, psychology, personnel and operations management and many other disciplines. This line of work, which blends insights from economics and psychology into modelling human behaviour (typically referred to broadly as “Behavioural Economics”), is an exciting and rapidly growing area of research into decision-making and its policy implications. A number of recent Nobel Prizes in Economics have been awarded to researchers in this field. The list includes:

• Daniel Kahneman of Princeton
• Elinor Ostrom of Indiana
• Alvin Roth of Harvard
• Vernon Smith of Chapman University
• Richard Thaler of Chicago 

The DECIDE Lab is equipped with 32 workstations wired to a local area network, with removable privacy partitions on three sides of each machine, a glass-partitioned control room at the back of the laboratory, projection equipment, a large screen and sliding white-boards. Researchers also have access to our “mobile lab”, consisting of ​​30 Samsung Galaxy tablets. This allows us to bring the Lab to the classroom rather than getting our participants/students to the Lab.​

The DECIDE Lab is open to all researchers at the University of Auckland (as well as others outside the University).

If you are an academic or industry researcher interested in conducting an experiment, please contact the Lab Manager to seek approval and find out about the logistics. If you are a PhD student needing to use the lab, ask your supervisor to get in contact with the Lab Manager.

Dr Valery Pavlov
Co-Director DECIDE Lab
Email: v.pavlov@auckland.ac.nz

You may also wish to contact Dr Haiping Zhang, the Ethics Adviser for the Department of Economics, for advice regarding human participants’ ethics approvals. The University requires that each separate project obtain an ethics approval. Most projects carried out in the DECIDE Lab qualify as “low risk” and are therefore usually qualified for expedited review, which implies a shorter waiting time prior to obtaining ethics approval. However, whether a project is subject to expedited review or not is a decision for the ethics lab and not the DECIDE Lab management.

Dr Haiping Zhang
Ethics Adviser, Department of Economics
Email: haiping.zhang@auckland.ac.nz