The City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia - Spain

IMEBESS 2025

Valencia, 22-24 May

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In conjunction with

EPS Academic


Enrique Fatás (European University in Valencia) is pleased to announce the ninth International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioral Social Sciences (IMEBESS) at the European University in Valencia, on the 22nd - 24th May 2025.

Programme Date/Time Programme

IMEBESS was started as a succession of the International Meeting series on Experimental and Behavioral Economics (IMEBESS), and had an inaugural meeting at Nuffield College, University of Oxford in April 2014. Since then, the meeting has occurred annually, at the Institute for Advanced Study at Toulouse in 2015, at the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli in 2016, at the Universitat de Barcelona in 2017, at the European University Institute in 2018, at the Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands, on 2nd - 4th May 2019, at the Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Lisbon, Portugal, on 18th - 20th May 2023 and the University of Riga, Latvia 23rd - 25th May 2024.

IMEBESS intends to bring together researchers in all areas of the social sciences who are interested in experimental methods. We believe that behavioural economics is increasingly informed by a very diverse range of research traditions. Hence, we are particularly interested in the participation of all social science disciplines with an interest in experimental and behavioural research, including anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology.


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» If you have any queries or difficulties accessing the system, please contact Melanie Sawers at mel.sawers@epsanet.org.


» Registration fee until March 31st, 2025: €370.

» Registration fee starting April 1st, 2025: €425.

» Registration deadline: April 15th, 2025.

» The registration deadline for presenters is March 31st, 2025.

CANCELLATION POLICY
If you must cancel your conference registration, please notify us as soon as possible at mel.sawers@epsanet.org. Cancellations notified before April 1, 2025, are entitled to a full refund minus a €50 processing fee. Cancellations notified from April 1, 2025 to April 10, 2025, are entitled to a 50-percent refund minus a €50 processing fee. Cancellations notified after April 10, 2025, as well as failure to attend, are not entitled to any refund.

» Conference participants are responsible for their own accommodation (click on “Programme” button above for our suggestions).


International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioral Social Sciences (IMEBESS) Code of Conduct

We are committed to providing a welcoming and harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion (or lack thereof).

We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, parties, X and other online media. IMEBESS conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the event at the discretion of the conference organisers.

This code of conduct applies to all participants, including the organizers and applies to all modes of interaction, both in-person and online.

IMEBESS conference participants agree to:

  • Be considerate in speech and actions and actively seek to acknowledge and respect the boundaries of fellow attendees.
  • Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behaviour and speech. Harassment includes but is not limited to: deliberate intimidation; stalking; unwanted photography or recording; sustained or wilful disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact; use of sexual or discriminatory imagery, comments, or jokes; and unwelcome sexual attention. If you feel that someone has harassed you or otherwise treated you inappropriately, please alert any member of the conference team in person.
  • Take care of each other. Alert a member of the conference team if you notice a dangerous situation, someone in distress, or violations of this code of conduct, even if they seem inconsequential.

Code of Conduct violations should be reported to the IMEBESS Ombudsperson Laura Fortunato (laura.fortunato@anthro.ox.ac.uk).


Synthetic Replication Games

The IMEBESS 2025 Synthetic Replication Games is a one-day in-person workshop organised by the Talking to Machines team in the context of a large replication project exploring the potential of large language models (LLMs) to augment human samples in experimental social science. This workshop invites researchers of all backgrounds and career stages to collaborate in adapting experimental studies from top-tier journals into a standardised format and replicate them using a variety of LLMs. The results will be presented in a dedicated round table at IMEBESS 2025, and contributors will be recognised as co-authors on the final publication. Click the button below for further details and the registration form.

Synthetic Replication Games

Invited Speakers

Catherine Eunice De Vries
Bocconi University

Catherine Eunice De Vries

Catherine is Dean for International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at Bocconi University. She is also a Research Associate at the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy, the Bocconi COVID Crisis Lab, the Bocconi Lab in European Studies and the CLEAN Unit for the Economic Analysis of Crime of the BAFFI-CAREFIN research center. Her work can be broadly situated in the areas political behaviour, political economy and EU politics, and has appeared in leading political science journals, such as the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. She have published several books.

She is also an associate member of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford, a member of European Integration Committee of the Dutch Advisory Council on Foreign Affairs (Adviesraad Internationale Vraagstukken), the Board of Trustees of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and sit on the editorial board of Acta Politica, Comparative Political Studies, European Union Politics, the Journal of Politics and Political Science Research and Methods. In 2014, she received the American Political Science Association Emerging Scholar Award for her contribution to the field of elections, public opinion and voting behaviour in 2014 and was selected a Young Global Leader in the World Economic Forum in 2013.


Charles Efferson
University of Lausanne

Charles Efferson

Charles is an evolutionary ecologist squarely focused on the evolution of human social cognition and human social behavior. Although he takes evolutionary ecology as an overarching framework, his research draws from anthropology, economics, psychology, and sociology.

Charles routinely mixes modeling with the analysis of both experimental and observational data. He has conducted fieldwork, laboratory experiments, and on-line experiments in Armenia, Brazil, Bolivia, Germany, Sudan, Switzerland, and the United States.


Dean Mobbs
California Institute of Technology

Dean Mobbs

Dean Mobbs is interested in the intersection of behavioral ecology, economics, emotion, and social psychology. By understanding the neural, computational and behavioral dynamics of human social and emotional experiences, he wants to develop theoretical models that merge those fields.

Using brain-imaging, computational modeling and behavioral techniques, his lab is probing the neurobiological systems responsible for fear and anxiety, revealing how people learn to control their fears, and how anxiety and psychiatric disorders disrupt those processes. He's interested in the value of social behavior. In particular, he's trying to determine the behavioral and neural signatures behind positive social interactions—for example, those involved with altruism, empathy, and when viewing others' success as rewarding (vicarious reward and reflected glory). His research also focuses on the interplay between social interaction and emotion—how fear can depend on whether you're alone or in a group (e.g. risk dilution).

Prior to Caltech, Mobbs was an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University and a research assistant at Stanford University. His awards include the APS Janet Spence Award For Transformative Early Career Contributions (2015) and the NARSAD Young Investigator Award (2015). He is a life fellow of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge.


Yan Chen
University of Michigan

Yan Chen

Yan Chen is the Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor in the School of Information at University of Michigan, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Economics at Tsinghua University. Her research interests are in behavioral and experimental economics, market and mechanism design. She is a former president of the Economic Science Association, an international organization of experimental economists. Chen has published in leading economics and management journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Theory, and Management Science, and general interest journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She serves as a Department Editor of Management Science.

Organizing Committee

Raymond Duch
University of Oxford

Raymond Duch

Raymond Duch is an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and the Director of the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS), which currently has centres in Oxford, Santiago (Chile) and Pune (India). Prior to assuming these positions he was the Senator Don Henderson Scholar in Political Science at the University of Houston. He is currently the Long Term Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Toulouse School of Economics, a Director of the European Political Science Association, and Vice-President of the Midwest Political Science Association. He is a member of the UK Cabinet Office Cross-Whitehall Trial Advice Panel to offer Whitehall departments technical support in designing and implementing controlled experiments to assess policy effectiveness.

Professor Duch's research focuses on responsibility attribution, incorporating elements of theory, experiments and analysis of public opinion. In 2008 he published an award-winning book, The Economic Vote, that demonstrates that citizens hold political parties accountable for economic outcomes. His experiments have identified the information shortcuts that individuals deploy for responsibility attribution. More recently, Professor Duch has conducted experimental research into cheating, exploring its implications for tax compliance, corruption and economic performance. Professor Duch has conducted lab, field and online experiments throughout the world He lectures and also publishes on experimental methods. His research appears in the leading political science and economic journals. He is the founder of Behavioural Analytics that advises public and private clients.


Enrique Fatás
European University of Valencia

Enrique Fatás

Enrique Fatás has joined the European University in Valencia (Spain) as a Professor of Economics at their Graduate School in Madrid, and as director of a newly created Behavioral Economics Institute. He is also a senior research fellow at the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics and the Penn Development Research Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, the Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx) at Nottingham University in the United Kingdom, and the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change at Ashoka University in India, among some others institutions.

Professor Fatás' research areas are behavioural economics, public economics, organizational behaviour, industrial organization and the economics of conflict. He has published his work in several journals in Economics and other disciplines (including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Management Science, or Psychological Science).


Jordi Brandts
Institute for Economic Analysis (CSIC)

Jordi Brandts

Jordi Brandts holds a B.A. in Economics from the UAB and a Ph. D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Research Professor of the Institute for Economic Analysis (CSIC) and of the Barcelona School of Economics. He is also a Research Fellow of CESifo and a member of BELIS (Bilgi University, Istanbul). His research is experimental in areas such as the study of cooperation, organizational economics, industrial organizational and market analysis, conflict and the effects of communication on strategic interaction.

From 2008 to 2013 he held the Serra-Ramoneda/Catalunya Caixa Chair at the Department of Business of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. From 2007 to 2011 he was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Experimental Economics. From 2016 to 2021 he was Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance. Since 2013 he serves as Advisory Editor for Games and Economic Behavior and since 2016 of the Review of Economic Design. From 2016 to 2020 he was European vice-president of the Economic Science Association and since 2021 he is on the Advisory Board of the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).


Diego Gambetta
Collegio Carlo Alberto

Diego Gambetta

Diego Gambetta is Professor of Social Theory at the European University Institute, and an Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Born in Turin, Italy, he received his PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, U.K, in 1983. From 1984 to 1991 he was Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge. Since 1992 he has held various positions at the University of Oxford. He has been visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Science Po and the Collège de France in Paris, ETH in Zurich, and Stanford University. Since 2000 he is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Gambetta's research interests include Analytical Sociology, Mafias, Signalling Theory and Applications, Trust and Mimicry, Violent Extremists, and Experimental Methods.


Laura Fortunato
University of Oxford

Laura Fortunato

Laura Fortunato is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She studied Biological Sciences at the University of Padova (Laurea, 2003) and Anthropology at University College London (MRes, 2004; PhD, 2009).

Professor Fortunato's research sits at the interface of biology and anthropology, with the aim to understand the evolution of human social and cultural behaviour, working on a variety of topics including family systems, culture, cooperation, competition, and social complexity.


Andris Saulītis
University of Latvia

Andris Saulītis

Andris Saulītis is the Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the University of Latvia and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Italy. He holds a Master's degree in Social Anthropology from The New School for Social Research, USA, and a PhD in Sociology from the European University Institute, Italy. His diverse educational background has equipped him with the proficiency to employ both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, particularly in the areas of economic behaviours and policy implementations. He has a distinguished record of conducting field experiments in collaboration with businesses and state institutions, tackling complex issues like debt collection, recycling behaviour and tax compliance.

Andris work has been published in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance and Critical Housing Analysis and other outlets. His forthcoming work on Covid-19 vaccination uptake will be featured in the book “What Works, What Doesn't (and When): Case Studies in Applied Behavioral Science”, edited by Dilip Soman and published by the University of Toronto Press.


Sonja Vogt
University of Lausanne

Sonja Vogt

Sonja is an associate professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Lausanne. She uses lab and field experiments to examine the social and psychological mechanisms practitioners can use to tackle societal and environmental challenges related to public health, education, climate change, and land degradation. Much of her research is in collaboration with UN agencies and local NGOs in Sudan, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, India, and Armenia.

Sonja is affiliated with Nuffield College and the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences at the University of Oxford, as well as the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern.

Sonja has published in journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, and disciplinary journals in Psychology, Economics, and Biology.


Edward Asiedu
University of Ghana Business School

Edward Asiedu

Dr. Edward Asiedu is a development economist and a lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School. He is also a research fellow and former postdoctoral research and teaching fellow at the Chair of Development Economics at the University of Passau, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Gottingen Germany and an M.A. in Economics from the University of Guelph, Ontario Canada.

His research is centered around topics in development economics, development finance, experimental and behavioral economics, public sector finance and impact evaluation of development projects. He has consulted for a number international organization on different projects, ranging from strengthening national and district revenue mobilization (World Bank), financing climate-resilience (European Union), enhancing business school training for farmers (GIZ), evaluating Ghana's financial sector 2017 (GIZ and the Ministry of Finance), evaluating the Medium-Term Agricultural Sector Investment Programme (METASIP), METASIP I & II (FAO) to evaluating the effectiveness of the decentralization programme in Togo (German Development Institute, DIE).

He has presented his work in a number of important international conferences, such as the Centre for Study of African Economies (CSAE) conference on Africa's development at the University of Oxford, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Boston, PEGNET Development Conference in ETH Zurich Switzerland, Canadian Economics Association (CEA) conference in Nova Scotia Canada, Economic Development Conference at the University of Wisconsin -Madison. He is a member of the Economic Science Association and the Canadian Economics Association. He has published his work in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Review of Income and Wealth, World Development, World Development Perspective, Review of Development Economics, International Journal of Development Issues, etc.


Klarita Gërxhani
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Klarita Gërxhani

Klarita Gërxhani is Professor in Socio-Economics and head of department of Ethics, Governance and Society, at the School of Business and Economics (SBE) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). Before joining the VU she was professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute (EUI).

Her main expertise lies in the micro-foundations of socio-economics. After completing her M.A. in General Economics at the Faculty of Economics, University of Tirana, Albania, she received her M. Phil and Ph.D. (2002) in Economics at the Tinbergen Institute and the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Amsterdam. She continued her academic career as a post-doctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies and the Amsterdam School for Social science Research at the University of Amsterdam.


Wojtek Przepiorka
University of Bern

Wojtek Przepiorka

Wojtek Przepiorka is Professor of Sociology, with a Focus on Sustainable Society, at the University of Bern. His research interests are in analytical, economic, and environmental sociology, organizational behavior and quantitative methodology. Wojtek uses a diverse set of research methods to study social norm dynamics, the workings of reputation mechanisms, communication in strategic interactions, intergroup relations, the interplay of moral norms and institutions, etc.

Before moving to Switzerland, Wojtek was a research fellow at the Nuffield College and the Department of Sociology in Oxford and assistant / associate professor at the Department of Sociology of Utrecht University. He studied sociology at the University of Bern and completed his doctorate at ETH Zurich (with distinction). Among his recent publications are “Applications of Signaling Theory in Sociological Scholarship.” (Annual Review of Sociology forthcoming) and “Meta-dominance analysis - A tool for the assessment of the quality of digital behavioural data” (with A. Schneck, Social Science Computer Review).


Astrid Hopfensitz
Lyon University

Astrid Hopfensitz

Astrid Hopfensitz is a professor at the Lyon University in France and member of the GATE lab. Before coming to Lyon she was working at the Toulouse School of Economics and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST). In 2017 she was elected member of the Institute Universitaire de France (IUF).

Astrid main research interest concerns the influence of emotions and psychological dimensions on economic decision making and behavior. She uses economic experiments in combination with psychological methods. In recent years she has been interested in topics related to social ties and social intelligence. She studied applied mathematics (Wirtschaftsmathematik) at the University of Ulm, Germany and economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She did her PhD in experimental economics at CREED, the experimental economics lab at the University of Amsterdam. After her PhD she did her Postdoc at the interdisciplinary center on affective sciences (CISA) in Geneva.


Lina Restrepo-Plaza
Universidad Europea de Valencia

Lina Restrepo-Plaza

Lina is a behavioral scientist dedicated to making the world a better place, with a focus on understanding and driving behavioral change in critical areas such as violence, discriminatory behavior, sexual harassment, and climate change. Her research also explores the effects of exposure to violence, the creation of political institutions, and the pathways that foster forgiveness and reconciliation.

Currently, she works at Universidad Europea de Valencia, a dynamic and growing private university, and she is a fellow at the Behavioral Economics Institute, where she engages in cutting-edge research and collaborations.

Throughout her career, she has partnered with renowned international organizations, including the World Bank, ILO, USAID, the Colombian Central Bank, and the Council of Europe, as well as local NGOs and public agencies. These collaborations aim to leverage behavioral sciences to enhance organizational performance and address pressing societal challenges.


Francisco José Garcia Ull
Universidad Europea de Valencia

Francisco José Garcia Ull

Francisco José García Ull has a degree in Advertising and Public Relations, a PhD in Communication (cum laude) and is a university professor, known for his work in the field of data privacy and digital communication. He is currently a professor at the European University, where he specializes in issues related to online communication and privacy. He is accredited by ANECA as an Assistant Professor, a Contracted Professor and a Private University Professor and has a six-year research period.

García Ull has contributed significantly to research on privacy, influence on social networks, disinformation and the impact of artificial intelligence on content generation.

He has presented his work at renowned centers, such as Harvard University (United States) or University College London (United Kingdom). In addition, he actively participates as a disseminator in different media, in the Spanish and Latin American spheres.


Maria Cristina Escamilla Robla
Universidad Europea de Valencia

Maria Cristina Escamilla Robla

Cristina is Professor of Criminology at the European University of Valencia. Teacher and researcher. Areas of Psychology and Criminology. Psychology of Traffic and Road Safety.

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