Agricultural and applied economists have begun routinely using behavioral and experimental economics tools to answer important questions about agri-environmental policies and programs. These tools offer valuable insights into decision-making that can advance our economic understanding of human behavior and inform evidence-based policies. However, conducting robust economic experiments on agri-environmental topics presents unique challenges that can make implementation of these studies difficult and limit the applicability of results. This chapter provides a practical guide for researchers regarding best practices for applying experimental and behavioral economics to agri-environmental research focused on producer decision-making. We begin with a brief overview of how insights from behavioral economics have contributed to related literatures over past decades and highlight how economic experiments have been used to answer important research questions in those domains. We describe the types of economic experiments used to answer policy-relevant questions and carefully consider the advantages and limitations of each method in various contexts. We also highlight important trade-offs between control, context, and representativeness to consider when determining the most appropriate type of experiment to conduct. The chapter emphasizes five contemporary issues related to conducting robust experimental economics studies: replicability, statistical power, publication bias, farmer and rural landowner recruitment, and detection of heterogeneous treatment effects. To assist researchers in addressing each issue, we outline best practices and we offer recommendations for researchers, editors, reviewers, and funders. We also discuss research ethics and community engagement. Finally, we present a framework for prioritizing future economics research that can inform agri-environmental programs and policies.
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Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE 2020) final report
On 16-17 December 2020, CAIDA hosted the 11th interdisciplinary Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE) in a virtual Zoom conference. This year our goal was to gather feedback from researchers on their experiences using CAIDA’s data for economics or policy research. We invited all researchers who reported use of CAIDA data in these disciplines. We discussed their successes and challenges of using the data, and how CAIDA could help these fields via Internet measurement and data curation. To avoid Zoom fatigue, we had a conversation-focused rather than presentation-focused workshop. Research topics we discussed included: Internet data for macroeconomics; connectivity and its effect on economic interdependence; effects of the EU’s new GDPR on internet interconnection; measuring corporate cyber risk; measuring work-from-home trends; measuring the economic value of open source software; and more generally how to best support evidence-based policymaking.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1724853
- PAR ID:
- 10351085
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
- Volume:
- 51
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0146-4833
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 25 to 27
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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