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17 October 2014
Friends of CESS:
As we start the new term I would like to review briefly the upcoming CESS events and news that
may be of interest to the experimental research community at Oxford.
To start with, I want to encourage students and staff to take advantage of the excellent
experimental facilities here at CESS. We have a great team here to help you implement stateof-the-art experimental research. And just to remind you, last year we have significantly
reduced the costs of conducting experiments at CESS. Moreover, for some departments there
are funds available to assist with student experimental projects. John Jensenius who is the
Assistant to the CESS Director is responsible in particular for the management of the CESS lab.
He should be your first contact if you are considering a lab experiment at CESS.
CESS also provides full support for online experiments – we can provide access to crowdsourced subjects (such as Amazon Mechanical Turk), the CESS Online, or commercial internet
panels. The CESS Online (http://cess.nuff.ox.ac.uk/cess-online) is an online opt-in panel started
in October 2013. CESS has been recruiting people from allover the UK through online
advertisement, and the total signups have reached 700. Aki Matsuo who is a research officer at
CESS is responsible for implementing these online experiments and helping with their design.
You can reach John and Aki at CESS@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.
CESS has also been active in the non-academic sector. At the end of September, CESS hosted
Oxera, an economic consulting firm, on a team building exercise. Members of Oxera’s
competition team had the opportunity to participate in two demonstration experiments,
learning about the value of experiments in research, as well as learning a bit about each other.
Additionally, CESS has agreed to take part in a project for the U.K. Department of Work and
Pensions. The experiments for this project will occur later this academic year.
As part of its efforts to support “excellent research in academia” Google Inc. has awarded CESS
with a Faculty Research Award, which provides funding for a research project to develop and
explore innovative methods for implementing rigorous behavioral experiments and surveys on
the Internet using different online platforms. CESS is in the process of hiring a candidate to
execute this project.
CESS continues to host prominent experimentalists from all social science disciplines as visiting
scholars. In the 2014-2015 academic year the following scholars will be visiting CESS: Jeffrey P.
Carpenter (Professor of Political Economy at Middlebury College), Catherine Hafer and Dimitri
Landa (Associate Professors at the Department of Politics, New York University), John T. Gasper
(Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Economy and Business Administration, Carnegie Mellon
University), and Jaimie W. Lien (Assistant Professor, School of Economics and Management
Tsinghua University). CESS now is actively searching for visiting scholar candidates who would
like to spend time at CESS to pursue their research projects and collaborate with experimental
social scientists in Oxford. Those who are interested in visiting can find detailed information at
http://cess-web.nuff.ox.ac.uk/visitors/.
This term we have assembled a great line-up of seminar speakers. Ozan Aksoy, a Research
Fellow in Experimental Social Sciences at CESS, is responsible for the CESS Seminar Series. You
can contact Ozan at the following e-mail: ozan.aksoy@sociology.ox.ac.uk. Our CESS seminars
take place at 5:00 pm, often either on Tuesday or Wednesday. They are followed by drinks in
the Nuffield JCR. The Trinity Term speakers are the following:
Oct 22 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Butler Room
Jeffrey Carpenter (Middlebury College) “Progressive Taxation in a Tournament
Economy”
Nov 12 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Butler Room
Björn Bartling (U Zurich) “Do Markets Erode Social Responsibility?”
Nov 19 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Butler Room
Steven Callander (GSB Stanford) “Optimal Search over Rugged Landscapes”
Nov 26 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Large Lecture Room
Colin Camerer (Caltech) “Experiments in dynamic unstructured bargaining with private
information and deadlines”
Dec 4 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Clay Room
Shanto Iyengar (Stanford) “Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group
polarization”
As part of our effort to help researchers with the design and implementation of their
experimental projects, CESS conducts a regular afternoon colloquia where students and staff
can present their preliminary research designs. The colloquium series is also organized by Ozan
Aksoy. These colloquia are attended by many of the senior experimentalists at the University of
Oxford and hence are an excellent opportunity to get valuable feedback on new experimental
projects. We particularly encourage students to participate in these colloquia. For those
interested please contact Ozan. Currently we have the following colloquia scheduled:
Oct 21 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm, Clay Room
Amrish Patel (U Gothenburg) “Reciprocity Networks and the Participation Problem”
Oct 28 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm, CESS Seminar Room
Ozan Aksoy (University of Oxford) “Equal but diverse or unequal but unified: Effects of
inequality and diversity on generalized cooperation and trust (An experimental design)”
Nov 11 @ 1:00 pm-2:00 pm, CESS seminar room
Peiran Jiao (University of Oxford) "Investors' reinforcement learning"
On Thursday 27 November 2014, CESS will organize an orientation workshop. The orientation is
designed to highlight the range of research questions that can be addressed with experimental
methods and to inform prospective experimentalists about how CESS can assist them in
designing and implementing experimental projects. The orientation targets all University of
Oxford faculty, post-docs, and students. In particular, we are interested in reaching those who
have had little experience in conducting experiments but either have experimental projects
they would like to implement or are thinking about using experiments as part of their research.
During the workshop the CESS team and prominent visiting scholars will present examples of
successful lab, online, and field experiments. We will also discuss the details of conducting
experimental research at CESS.
All of CESS events and facilities are open to the scholarly community although some of them
will have fees – please consult our web page for details.
If you have any questions about CESS events or conducting experiments at CESS please contact
any one of us.
Sincerely,
Ray Duch
Director, CESS
raymond.duch@nuffield.ox.ac.uk