Designing and programming a graphical interface to evaluate treatments in economics experiments

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a graphical interface that allows to calculate the efficacy of one or more treatments before adopting an experimental economics design. The graphical interface is built with Java according to a model-based treatment design. The aim is twofold. We are first interested in designing treatments in order to increase their efficacy, evaluating how experimental factors can affect the treatment process design. The second aim is to enhance the internal and external validity of the experiment to be run. The general idea behind this research is to implement a Graphical Experimenter Interface (GEI) capable to support economists when deciding which experimental treatment design to adopt and thus which factors to include.