Abdullah Gül University (AGU) has now an Experimental Economics Laboratory which is one of the few of its kind in Turkey. Thanks to the lab, human behaviors will be evaluated as the main component of the economy and decision makers will be helped with effective policy recommendations and to make more effective decisions.
Founded with the advice of Assoc. Prof. Eyüp Doğan, Head of the Economics Department, the lab saw the first experiment in Dr. Ali Yavuz Polat's "Experimental Economics" class.
Students joined the "Public Goods" experiment at the AGU Experimental Economics Laboratory, one of the few such labs in Turkey.
This experiment has an important place in the experimental economics literature, and it is used to understand whether people contribute to public goods, and if they contribute, what motives and incentives drive their contribution.
Public goods inherently have the problem of free-riding, and it is important to determine how free-riders in a society affect behaviors of other people, and to understand how public goods need to be financed. In this respect, the experimental economics method offers useful data for understanding the decision-making mechanism.
In the near future, it is planned to carry out different experiments with broader and heterogeneous groups at the Experimental Economics Laboratory.
In the experimental economics method, participants make decisions in experiments involving real incentives at the laboratory equipped with computers, and later those decisions are analyzed.
