“Experimentation is an act of humility, an acknowledgment that there is simply no way of knowing without trying something different.” Sendhil Mullainathan

The college years are known as a time for experimentation – trying on new identities, new habits, new friendships, and new areas of study. This course will focus on developing a life-long “experimental mindset” and will explore frameworks and tools for designing, conducting, and evaluating the results of experiments. Well-designed experiments can provide insights for public policy, business decisions, and personal life choices. Students will learn the basic concepts of experiments that apply across many disciplines throughout the sciences and social sciences and how to interpret data-driven results. They will also learn about major experimental results in the social sciences, particularly in the area of behavioral economics, and will design their own experiments that have direct relevance to life and career decisions students may be facing in their lives beyond Georgetown.

Carrie von Bose is a behavioral economist with expertise in applied microeconomics, game theory, and experimental design. She’s worked across a variety of content areas and methodological approaches to design and implement studies that provide insights into the behavior of consumers, citizens, and employees. She’s very interested in the decision-making process, particularly in improving choice architecture and removing frictions that keep people from taking actions that align with their long-term goals. Her work with various government and private sector clients has touched on financial decision-making, social norms, voting behavior of overseas citizens, data analytics in military policy-making, consumer privacy, and improving the usability of government forms. She’s designed and implemented lab and field experiments, large-scale survey efforts, small-scale usability studies, and complex data modeling efforts. She’s a strong advocate of bridging the gap between academia and the real world by bringing intellectual rigor to applied research problems.