Welcome
to the Aton Experimental Economics Laboratory
Last Updated: 6th March 2008
The Aton Experimental Economics
Laboratory (AEELab) is an independent laboratory providing a range of
consulting, software and business
services, in particular to provide the expertise and
infrastructure for the conduct of experimental
economics. We provide lab support services and
experimental software for a number of groups in Australia and overseas,
including working with groups based at:
The Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic
Science
(ICES) at George Mason University
CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems
The University of Canberra
The Australian National University
The University of Sydney
About the
AEELab
The parent company of the AEELab is Aton Consulting Pty
Ltd, which is a specialist consulting firm that has been operating
since 1996. In 2006 and 2007 Aton operated the SIRCA
Experimental
Economics Lab (SEELab) in a joint venture with SIRCA. By mutual
agreement this JV was closed in mid 2007, and all materials and
contracts previously conducted by SEELab
have been transfered to the AEELab.
The owner and director of Aton Consulting is Dr. Karel
Nolles.
Karel became involved in experimental economics
during
his PhD research work commencing in the late 1990's. He
worked as an academic for a number of
years, including with the University of New South Wales (Senior
Research Fellow in the Faculty of Commerce and Economics) and as a
visiting research fellow with the ICES experimental economics labs at
George Mason University.
The AEELab currently employees 8 staff, mostly
with an
IT focus, who develop experiments and related materials for our
clients. We also have a number of fellow academics and other
researchers who
frequently collaborate with us on experimental economics based
work. Some of the resulting materials are available under "papers"
Karel is currently employed full-time as an
Associate
Director in the Global Climate Change Practice at Macquarie Capital in
Sydney, and is thus continuing his research and academic activities in
a part-time capacity.
What is
Experimental Economics ?
Experimental economics is the application of
laboratory
methods to test the validity of various economic theories and
to test bed new market mechanisms. Using cash-motivated participants,
economic experiments create real-world incentives to help us better
understand why markets and other exchange systems work the way they
do. We have listed some papers at the bottom of this page
that
provide more information about experimental economics as a discipline.
What does
the AEELab provide ?
The AEELab exists to support consultants,
researchers
and academics to conduct and use experimental economics
research.
We manage experimental economics lab facilities at a number of
university campuses, and can provide easy access to labs and student
participants for persons wishing to
run experiments. We also develop experiments to address
specified
research questions, and are a research facility in our own right,
conducting experiments in respect of our research agenda.
Many of
our working papers are available for download on the "papers" page.
In particular, the AEE Lab can provide:
Lab management and control software and systems
Hosting of experiments in other labs using our
web
based experiment management systems.
Development of experiments, drawing upon our
software library of robust and running experiments.
Delivery of experiments via our existing labs.
How do I
learn more ?
To discuss the activities of the Lab, please
contact
Karel Nolles:
More
information about Experimental Economics ?
You may be interested to read the following
materials at
the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science at George Mason
University. ICES is headed by Professor Vernon Smith, who was
the
co-reciepient of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, in recognition of
his contributions to the field of Experimental Economics.
The links below take you to the ICES
website. The
materials are ICES Copyright.
Markets are frequently used to provide important public
services - with the intention of driving efficency of
delivery.... Are all markets equal for all policy
problems? The link below is to a Video Clip showing a fabulous
market in
operation. (They should have asked us to test it
first!!!)
Download
here (Approx 4MB)
(FULL RIGHTS TO THE CREATORS)
The AEELab provides a web based experiment
scheduling service for a number of universities. If you are interested
to participate in experiments, or to see the calendar of scheduled
experiments on your campus, select your location from the list below.
