Registering as a potential participant and participating in a particular experiment.

Registering as a potential participant

EXEC maintains a register of potential participants. This register is called hroot (Hamburg Registration and Organization Online Tool). If you are interested in principle in participating in our experiments, we would first ask you to register on hroot by clicking on this link.We should note that we are making it a requirement of all registrants that they have a standard York e-mail address - that is, one ending in @york.ac.uk. If you try and register with some other e-mail address you will see an error message.

Participating in particular experiments

When we are running particular experiments, we will send out an invitation to people on the hroot register asking them whether they wish to participate in the experiment. Usually we will give information as to how long the experiment will last and how much you might earn. In all our experiments we pay participants - the amount depending on what the participant does, sometimes on chance and sometimes on what the other participants do. We calibrate our experimetns so that participants on average earn somewhat more than the living wage.

Our experimental protocols

We should note that none of our experiments involve any pain or deception. You will be asked to solve some decision problem, usually interacting via a computer. Payments are usually made immediately after the end of the experimental session. We should note that places on experimental sessions are usually limited and frequently there are more people who want to book a place in an experiment than there are places available. Occasionally people who have booked do not show up. As you might imagine, this causes problems for us and for the other participants. As a consequence, we will eliminate from the hroot register people who book a place in an experiment but who do not show up and do not proffer a valid excuse. Also, because of the fact that not all people who book actually turn up, we typically book in a small number of reserves. Those reserves that are not needed are paid a show-up fee to thank them for turning up.