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| Wharton Behavioral Lab | |
|---|---|
| Name | Wharton Behavioral Lab |
| Established | 2000s |
| Location | University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia |
| Director | Andrea Weber |
| Affiliation | The Wharton School |
| Focus | Behavioral economics, decision sciences, experimental psychology |
Wharton Behavioral Lab The Wharton Behavioral Lab is a research facility at the University of Pennsylvania focused on experimental studies of decision making, judgment, and behavior. It supports faculty and student projects across behavioral economics, marketing science, and organizational behavior, hosting laboratory experiments, field studies, and online protocols. The Lab operates within The Wharton School and collaborates with a range of scholars, centers, and external organizations.
The Lab functions as a hub for empirical research involving human subjects from the Philadelphia region and online panels, providing equipment, software, and administrative support for experiments in choice, incentives, and social preferences. It coordinates with Wharton units such as the Behavioral Economics Forum, Wharton School, Wharton Legal Studies & Business Ethics Department, and centers including the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, Mack Institute for Innovation Management, and the Penn Institute for Economic Research. The facility engages with researchers affiliated with institutions such as Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Chicago, and Yale University.
Primary topics include decision making under risk and uncertainty, intertemporal choice, social preferences, trust, cooperation, fairness, and market behavior. Work addresses classic paradigms from Prospect Theory, Ultimatum Game, Public Goods Game, Trust Game, and Dictator Game, and intersects with studies on learning from Reinforcement Learning, heuristics from Kahneman–Tversky research, and norms described in Game Theory literature. Cross-disciplinary projects connect to research programs at Penn Medicine, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, and applied studies with Federal Reserve Board, National Bureau of Economic Research, and World Bank collaborators.
The Lab maintains experimental cubicles, computer workstations, audio-visual recording capabilities, and secure data servers for behavioral and neuroeconomic protocols. It uses software and platforms such as z-Tree, Qualtrics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and custom code in Python (programming language), R (programming language), and MATLAB to implement incentivized choice tasks, auctions (e.g., Vickrey auction), and multi-stage elicitations. Facilities support physiological measures linked to studies referencing methods from functional magnetic resonance imaging collaborations, eye-tracking aligned with Tobii Technology protocols, and pupillometry informed by research in Cognitive Neuroscience.
Participants are recruited from university subject pools, community outreach, and online panels, including collaborations with Prolific (research platform), Amazon Mechanical Turk, and local Philadelphia community organizations. The Lab adheres to human subjects protections under Institutional Review Board oversight at University of Pennsylvania, aligning with standards set by Office for Human Research Protections and ethical guidelines popularized in literature by American Psychological Association. Consent procedures, payment protocols, and debriefing follow norms established in seminal work by researchers at Stanford University, Princeton University, and Columbia University.
Research produced at the Lab contributes to empirical debates on loss aversion, present bias, social preferences, and market institutions, with articles published in journals such as American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Science (journal), and Nature Human Behaviour. Studies emerging from the Lab have examined effects predicted by Prospect Theory, documented behavioral regularities akin to findings by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler, and evaluated interventions inspired by Nudge (book) concepts. Work has been cited in policy analyses by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, U.S. Department of the Treasury, and reports from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
The Lab partners with university units including the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative, Annenberg School for Communication, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and research centers such as the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. It has hosted visiting scholars from London School of Economics, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of California, Berkeley, and institutional collaborations with Google, Microsoft Research, Amazon (company), and non-profits like The Brookings Institution and RAND Corporation. These partnerships support translational projects linking experimental findings to product design, regulatory analysis, and public policy.
The Lab was established in the early 21st century as part of The Wharton School’s expansion into behavioral research and has been shaped by faculty leaders with backgrounds in behavioral economics, experimental economics, and organizational behavior. Funding has come from internal Wharton funds, grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, awards from foundations like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, and sponsored research from private partners including technology firms and financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The Lab’s growth parallels the broader institutional investments in behavioral research across universities including Harvard University, Stanford University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.