Q. Do I have to show up when I am invited to an experiment?

A. When you receive an invitation email, this is simply an announcement of available economics experiments that you MAY choose to participate. You will only participate in the invited economics experiment if explicitly confirmed your participation. In order to confirm participation, you must click on a link provided in the invitation email and pick one of the (possible) several dates that the experiment is offered. After confirming your participation in a specific experiment, you will get a confirmation e-mail of your registration.

However, when you have registered for a certain experiment, you should come, of course. However, if you are unable to make it, please read the “Cancel registration” FAQ for information regarding cancelling your participation.

Q. Do you pay me for participating in experiments? How much?

A. In principle, every participant will receive a payment for their decisions made during the experiment. The size of the payment depends on your decisions as well as possibly the decisions of the other participants and random variables. For scientific reasons we do not provide information about the exact range and expected mean of the payoff for a particular experiment.

Q. How can I cancel my registration for an experiment?

A. There is no feature which allows you to cancel your registration within this recruitment program. You must know prior to confirming participation for an economics experiment if you are available. However, if you become ill or are not able to attend due to some unforeseeable event, answer to your invitation e-mail and ask to be signed off AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (minimum 24 hours prior to the experiment). Please state your reasons in detail.
If you do not show up for the experiment and have not cancelled your registration, you will forfeit any opportunity to participate in any future economics experiments.

Q. I have registered for an Experiment, but cannot register for all the other experiments, because they disappeared!

A. Nearly all experiments consist of several sessions. For most experiments, participants are only allowed to participate in one of these sessions. Therefore, if you register for one session of a particular experiment, the other sessions will disappear from the list, i.e., you will no longer see the other sessions for this experiment because you will have fulfilled your availability for that particular experiment.

Q. I've seen that there are Sessions with free places in the calendar. Why I cannot register for these sessions?

A. The database of available participants is VERY large (almost 2000 participants). For most experiments, we invite only a random subset out of all the participants. We do that for a couple reasons: (1) to ensure that not always only participants with instant access to their email participate at the experiments, and (2) we don’t want to bombard everyone with experiment invites when only a small subset of participants are required to participate.

On the other hand, sometimes we invite only participants with certain characteristics, for instance, people who have not participated in some former experiments.Thus it is possible that you see experiment sessions in the calendar, but are not invited for them. However, if there are not enough participants registering for these sessions, we will send out invitations to more participants.

Q. What is the meaning of the three question marks after an experiment under "Experiments you participated"?

A. After counducting an experiment we need some time to update the participant database. As long as the experimenter has not filled in the participation data, there will be the three question marks as the "show-up" status for an experiment. When the data is there, the status will change to either "yes" or "no".

Q. Who can apply for a subject account?

A. Anyone who is interested in participating in experiments can apply for a subject account. However, to participate in laboratory experiments, you should be able to come to our laboratories located in Christchurch, New Zealand.