Funding

Funding policies

In addition to lab facilities, experimenTUM provides funding to support experiments conducted by members of the TUM School of Management in the experimenTUM lab. Applications for funding can be submitted at the beginning of each quarter. Deadlines are on January 2, April 1, July 1, and October 1.

The application for funding can be submitted after the application for using the lab has been approved or together with this application. Funding is restricted to approved experiments. Applications include a research proposal along with the calculation of the costs, the full instructions, and the timeline of the experiment (see below).

The decision on funding depends on the quality of the application and the funds available. Full funding is provided exceptionally and for excellent applications only. Typically, no more than half of the costs are funded. Priority is given to applications which benefit from guaranteed funding by other sources at the time of submission.

Decisions on funding are conditional and funding is paid out after the experiment. If experiments are not conducted according to the original application, no funding will be granted. Prospective applicants are urged to contact the manager of the lab early when preparing their applications for using the lab and for funding.

Research proposals

The research proposal describes the experiment briefly. It outlines the research question; the motivation; the state of the art; the author's hypotheses; the design of the experiment; the desired contribution; possible implications. The proposal must not exceed 2,000 words, including references, and may be in German or English.

It is vital for the proposal to explain, first, what it is exactly that the authors hope to find—i.e., their research question; second, how the answer to their research question contributes to prior literature. References should be directly related to the research question and to the hypotheses rather than listed in a summary fashion.

In particular, the proposal must detail

1. what exactly the experiment is intended to measure, and how the authors want to measure it (e.g., individual decision problem, decision in a game, survey question);
2. how participants' compensation is determined and whether and how their decisions or answers are incentivized;
3. what information is given to the participants;
4. how the experimental treatments differ from each other.

The proposal should also clarify in which sense the experimental design is novel and how it allows answering the stated research question. In case the experiment replicates a previous study, the proposal should clarify why the replication is important.

The instructions include the entire information to be displayed on the screens during the experiment. It is understood that the instructions provided with the application are preliminary and may be revised. The calculation of the costs must comply with the lab policies on compensation and show-up fees.

The purpose of experimenTUM is to fund lab experiments rather than surveys. Studies that exploit the opportunities that the lab offers are heavily preferred. These opportunities include that participants can individually interact with the computer; they can interact with each other through the network; and pay can be based on participants' decisions.