Centre for Experimental Economics - Centre for Experimental Economics, University of York

Sad News: The demise of the EXEC physical laboratory

Mainly because of the coronavirus crisis, but also partly due to the fact that the machines in our beautiful lab had an out-of-date operating system, and we could not get finance to purchase new ones, our lab has been closed and moved to another use. This is sad because an EXEC laboratory, in some form or another, has existed since 1988.

The partly ameliorating good news: our move to online experiments

Mark Wilson and the IT Department of the University have laboured long and hard, and come to our rescue and have provided us with a platform on which we can securely run online experiments. These are not the same as lab experiments, but we have overcome most of the problems. For those interested in using our online lab (or indeed recruiting subjects from our hroot register, should read the information on the right.

Information for potential users of our online lab

As ever, we welcome other experimental economists to use our (online) lab; several people have already used it. Anyone wanting to use it should contact John Hey. Below are the 'rules and regulations'.

All subjects in any experiment should be members of the University of York. This is a condition imposed on us by IT for security reasons. This will be the case if they are recruited from our hroot register.

All experimenters should also have a York username.

All users of the laboratory will be asked to sign their agreement to the Ethical Statement (PDF , 646kb) agreed by EXEC with the University.

This document Running an Online Experiment at York (MS Word , 15kb) describes the operation of the laboratory that potential experimentalists will find invaluable. It describes the processes for Ztree and exe experiments.

You can download a Template for hroot invitations (MS Word , 12kb) and a Template for hroot confirmations (MS Word , 13kb) that you will fnd useful for hroot.

Here is a Matlab program that you may find useful. Run it from your downloads folder.

Here there are exec receipts (PDF , 30kb) for use in experiments. For online experiments, Finance will collect receipts.

Potential users should contact Mark Wilson in advance of their experiment, informing him what items they need for their experiment (if other than Ztree and an exe experiment).