Kevin Esterling and Mike Tomz send along the following announcement:
The sixth annual meeting of the West Coast Experiments Conference will be held at Stanford University on Friday, May 10.
We encourage anyone with an interest in experiments to attend; graduate students are especially welcome, as well as those who are new to experimental research. The WCE conference is organized more as a methods “workshop” than as a venue to engage in subfield debates. Presenters focus on one or two methodological take away points of their experimental work. The goal is to give the audience applied, practical advice on methods and design in a way that will help them improve their own experimental research.
The WCE conference is a single day meeting, starting at 9 and ending after dinner. Although we do not have the money to cover travel or lodging expenses, we will provide all meals on that day and we promise a good conversation.
Presentations include (in no particular order):
Alvin Roth (Stanford Economics): Market design experiments concerning deceased organ allocation (joint work with Judd Kessler)
Scott Desposato (UCSD Political Science): Ethics in comparative politics experiments
Guido Imbens (Stanford Graduate School of Business): Some comments on stratification and re-randomization in randomized experiments
Luke Keele (Penn State Political Science): Conditioning on post-treatment quantities with structural mean models; experimental design in political psychology applications:
Jennifer Merolla (CGU Political Science): Methodological issues surrounding the use of the Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE)
Eric Dickson (NYU Political Science): “Legitimacy and Enforcement: An Experimental Investigation” (using experimental games to measure psychological quantities and parse psychological mechanisms, joint work with Sandy Gordon and Greg Huber)
Gabriel Lenz (Berkeley Political Science): Identifying the effect of candidate appearance on vote choice (without assigning candidates to plastic surgery….)
Ted Miguel (Berkeley Economics) also will give an update on the Berkeley Initiative on Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) at lunchtime.
The conference will be held in the Koret Taube Conference Center at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), located at 366 Galvez Street.
Registration is free. For details on registration, local arrangements, and for updates, please visit