ECON-3010 Final project: Literature review

Research paper (about 5 pages single spaced)

How can we get people to act the way we want?  We want them to recycle, eat healthier food, save more for retirement, vote in the elections, study harder, put in their best effort at work. How can a company sell more without spending more on marketing? Behavioral economics provides insights. You, me, a manager, and the government – on all levels we can use incentives to nudge people into making the right choices, and we can appeal to emotions to trick people into making the right choices.

The goal of this research project is to examine deeper one of the topics that captured your attention during this course, and to collect most recent evidence on the topic from behavioral economics literature. Think of your topic in the form of a research question. For example: Are there gender differences in making financial decisions? How can the government use nudges to solve a specific problem? How can a manager use incentives to motivate workers in your industry? Does happiness increase with income? Is there a particular behavioral puzzle that you observe around you and wish to explore in depth? Links and books below discuss applications of behavioral economics, they can help you develop your research question. You may also go back and re-watch some of the videos under course modules.

Start your paper by explaining why this is an interesting and important question. Find some numbers to substantiate your point. For example, if your paper is about gender differences, your numbers may help quantify income gender gap. If your paper is about a specific industry, look up comparative size of this industry. And so on.

An excellent paper should include at least 5 references to recent published papers written by economists, from economics literature (rather than pure psychology), or articles from The Economist. You should devote at least one long paragraph to at least 3 of these publication describing the authors’ findings, data, sample, methods and implications.  Was it an experimental setting with college students and a sample size N=100? Was it an observational study of several thousand respondents to a survey?  For best results select articles that offer experimental evidence, because experiments are the main tool of behavioral economics research. Prioritize recent sources published in the last 6 years. Note that we are less interested in papers that describe general insights from BE, but rather in papers that include specific experiments.

Here are ways to find papers written by economists:

1. Search online or use JSTOR article database on ESU library site. Within JSTOR choose advanced search, ‘Economics’ journals, year 2018-present, and use your keywords in abstract.
2. Search in the BE journals, list below.
3. Log in the ESU library to read The Economist. Search within the journal for ‘behavioral economics’ or for specific keywords related to your topic.
4. Search for brand new research findings among discussion paper on https://www.iza.org/publications/dp using ‘behavioral economics’ or your topic keywords. These are cutting edge paper, some are still unpublished.
5. Use the AI research assistant Scispace at  https://scispace.com/ for your literature review. Try your search more than once. Use longer and shorter versions of your research question.   Scispace offers a free basic account, some features are available without registration. You may be able to use AI prompts to ask about research methods used in the study. If not, there is always a traditional way: by reading the article (notice, some articles are in open access). Use the AI-generated  outline as a guide, not as your entire paper. Be sure to verify that the articles exist, since AI platforms are still at their early stages of development and have been known to occasionally hallucinate. You are allowed to use other Ais, for example  this is another research assistant tool:  https://consensus.app/ . The tool will help you find articles, but you still have to read them, so make sure you choose articles written in English. Using only abstracts is not enough, they are too general.

At the end of the paper, include a paragraph in which you explain your research process – what prompts you used in which AI, what information was obtained without AI, what source or prompt you found most helpful, what were the drawbacks in writing this paper. This will earn you an extra point since I am also interested in learning whether AI can improve the quality of a research and writing.