Experimental Economics in Virtual Reality

Özgür Gürerk, Andrea Bönsch, Lucas Braun, Christian Grund, Christine Harbring, Thomas Kittsteiner and Andreas Staffeldt

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Recent developments in virtual reality (VR) technology have the potential to revolutionize the way economists do experimental research. With Oculus’ light and affordable head mounted display (HMD) human subjects can literally move and use objects in virtual spaces and interact with others. This technology as well as surround-screen projection systems like CAVEs (Cruz-Neira et al. 1994), allow the experimenter to observe economically relevant behavior and social interaction in a highly immersive and at the same time tightly controlled virtual environment. More than other disciplines, economics focuses on the evaluation of counterfactual scenarios which help to analyze strategic decisions and their efficiency effects. In this note, by means of three examples, we illustrate how experiments in highly IVEs can add value to experimental economics and benefit economic research.

Keywords: experimental economics; virtual reality; immersive virtual environment; risk preferences; real effort; avatar; reflection problem; experimental methodology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-12, Revised 2015-01-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/62073/1/MPRA_paper_62073.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/66617/9/MPRA_paper_66617.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/71409/17/MPRA_paper_71409.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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