Kenju Kamei - Appointed in AY2022

Using behavioral and experimental economics methods, I research various questions in applied economics related to issues like moral hazard, such as shirking in organizations, and the behavioral characteristics and institutional performance of people in social dilemmas, such as free-riding behavior in society. When I first entered the Doctoral Programs in Economics at Brown University, I vaguely thought I wanted to do macroeconomic research on (financial) econometrics and Japan's financial system. However, through my coursework and other experiences at the university, I became strongly attracted to behavioral economics, which modifies theory based on psychological insights, and particularly to empirical research based on laboratory experiments that test the principles of human behavior. This led me to choose my current field of research. The period from around 2006 to 2010, when I was in the Doctoral Programs, was when the excitement for behavioral and experimental economics research was peaking in the United States. My attraction to behavioral and experimental economics may have been influenced by my undergraduate studies in engineering at the University of Tokyo. The method of designing experiments with an engineering sense and flexible thinking, and gathering students as subjects in a computer lab to test economic hypotheses, is similar to experiments in the field of engineering. It is a field that stimulates intellectual curiosity in terms of both its methodology and research content.

Behavioral and experimental economics is a field that uses laboratories in a manner most akin to science to unravel the relationship between concepts from various economic fields—such as economic theory, business economics, labor economics, and public economics—and actual human behavior in those settings. By conducting experiments, we can clearly examine treatment effects and causal relationships. Sometimes the results align with theory and concepts, while other times they do not. I find it incredibly fascinating that the true pleasure of this field lies in accepting the results straightforwardly and, when a discrepancy arises between experimental results and theory, analyzing how to revise theoretical models or the premises of arguments, or why real people behave differently from the suggestions of standard economic theory, thereby approaching new truths about humanity. Another appeal of behavioral and experimental economics is its interdisciplinary nature, spanning various fields of economics. Not only does it allow for the study of questions from different economic domains, but each project involves everything from theoretical consideration to conducting experiments and data analysis. This "all-around player" research stance is also one of its charms.

In the real world, which deals with human beings, things often do not go according to economic theory, and we make new discoveries every day by studying economic experiments and human behavior patterns. When you study economics, I believe you will find it more interesting if you maintain a questioning eye from a broader perspective. By considering from the principles of human behavior how well the assumptions, settings, and theoretical implications of various specialized fields of economics hold true for real-world phenomena—and if they do, why; and if they don't, which assumptions are not valid—you will make many discoveries.