Campus News
Experimental economist explores overlooked aspects of human behavior
Alumna Alessandra Cassar, now a professor at the University of San Francisco, found her path by working with UC Santa Cruz’s Learning and Experimental Economics Projects (LEEPS) laboratory as a graduate student.
Despite an abundance of strong economic theory compiled over the decades, it’s still notoriously difficult to predict what economic systems will do. That’s because the economy is driven by an especially wild variable: people.
Human behavior is extremely fickle, but it’s also a fundamental underpinning of economic systems, driving product demand, financial trends, policy decisions, and much more. So making better economic predictions ultimately requires building a stronger understanding of what people are likely to do and why.
That’s where experimental economics comes in. Alessandra Cassar got her start in the field as a Ph.D. student in the UC Santa Cruz Economics Department, where she became co-director of the Learning and Experimental Economics Projects (LEEPS) laboratory. Now, as a faculty member at University of San Francisco, she uses a combination of laboratory and field experiments to study evolutionary influences on human behavior.
“The whole idea of experimental economics is to come up with games that extract behavioral traits that are otherwise hard to accurately measure,” Cassar explained. “When we set up games in a lab setting, we can see to what extent people are cooperative or prosocial or willing to punish. To really discover these traits and how they affect the properties of markets, we have to play it out in the lab.”
Cassar says she initially came to UC Santa Cruz to study international economics and finance. But by chance, she applied to be a research assistant for Professor Daniel Friedman, founder of the LEEPS lab. The experience would change her entire career trajectory.
“Dan Friedman was a real leader in experimental economics, and the LEEPs lab that he set up at UC Santa Cruz was one of the first experimental economics labs in all of California,” Cassar recalls. “Working with LEEPS was where I discovered what I really wanted to do. Dan was a wonderful teacher and mentor, and the department as a whole also offered a lot of freedom for faculty and students to explore ideas in interdisciplinary and creative ways.”
Many of the ideas that Cassar went on to study relate to the behaviors, motivations, and experiences of women. For example, one of her most cited papers, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, delved into female competitiveness.
“Early in my career, there was a lot of talk about the gender pay gap and why there are not as many women in leadership roles, and many experimental economists were convinced that it was because women were just not as competitive as men,” Cassar said. “But I knew many women who had dropped out of careers, and there was no way it was because they weren’t competitive enough. I knew them well enough to know better.”
Guided by her intuition, Cassar dug deeper into interdisciplinary literature on the topic and found the work of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a primatologist who posited that female primates competed in different ways, which were often overlooked by predominantly male researchers. Inspired by Hrdy’s work, Cassar designed a typical economics experiment to measure competitiveness, but with one major change that proved crucial.
“We changed what people were competing for,” she explained. “When the prize is something to benefit your children, rather than just personal gain, suddenly we now find that women compete just as much as the men.”
In the years since, Cassar has continued working to uncover additional behavioral strategies that are more common among women. She has also explored issues like the behavioral consequences of conflict and disaster, the role that social networks play in economic outcomes, and how to support individual economic empowerment. In her current role as a Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, she leads the Econ Lab Without Borders, through which she and her students travel around the world, studying these topics and many more.
Looking back on her own experiences, Cassar says today’s students can set themselves up for success by keeping an open mind throughout their academic journeys and traveling in whichever direction their interests take them.
“Especially for graduate school, I think it’s really important to find a place that’s the right fit for you, where you have a connection with your advisor and can study something that you’re passionate about,” she said. “I found my path by following my passions, and I’m grateful for the freedom that UC Santa Cruz gave me to be able to do that.”