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Troy, NY
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billuraksoy@gmail.com
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5182763925
- 0000-0003-0658-0440
About
I am an experimental economist working at the intersection of behavioral, public, and labor economics. My research investigates how economic decision-making is shaped by social context, institutional environments, individual differences, and increasingly, by interactions with technology. I design controlled laboratory and field experiments to uncover causal mechanisms behind key economic behaviors, with a focus on cooperation, fairness, identity-driven preferences, and human-technology interactions. My work spans three broad areas: social preferences, identity and economic outcomes, and experimental methodology.
A central theme of my research is understanding social preferences—how and when people care about fairness, cooperation, and the welfare of others. These preferences play a crucial role in economic outcomes such as charitable giving, workplace collaboration, and public goods provision. My work examines how factors like resource scarcity, social identity, and organizational mission influence altruistic and cooperative behavior.
A second line of my research explores how social identities—such as gender and sexual orientation—shape preferences, beliefs, and economic outcomes. I study how individual differences interact with economic environments.
In addition, I work on improving experimental methodology by revisiting classic experimental designs to test their validity and by developing new experimental tools. More recently, I have expanded my research to study how individuals interact with digital technologies and AI systems in economic decision-making. My research has received external funding from organizations including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
I received my PhD in Economics from Texas A&M University in 2019, my MS in Economics in 2011 from the University of Southampton in the U.K., and my BA in Economics in 2010 from Ankara University in Turkey.
Research
Teaching
At RPI, I teach courses in experimental and behavioral economics, drawing on my research expertise to equip students with practical skills and research experience.
At the undergraduate level, I offer Behavioral Financial Economics, where we discuss how emotional and cognitive biases impact financial and economic decisions. Students learn frameworks to understand and navigate these biases in real-world contexts, such as investment planning and other financial decision-making. They also apply these insights to everyday economic choices. I also teach Experimental Economics. In this course, students are introduced to experimental methods used in economics and related social sciences. A distinctive feature of this course is a hands-on project where students design, implement, and analyze their own experiments, allowing them to apply theoretical concepts and develop their analytical and communication skills through presentations and a final report.
At the graduate level, I teach Behavioral and Experimental Economics I, a PhD-level course that provides a comprehensive overview of experimental and behavioral economic research, introducing students to advanced experimental methods and the current research frontier. It equips students with advanced tools to design, conduct, and analyze experiments in economics and related social sciences. The course emphasizes choice behavior, field and survey experiments, and econometric techniques commonly used with experimental data, preparing students to engage in high-quality, independent research. The course attracts PhD students from economics and other departments, demonstrating the broad applicability of experimental methods across disciplines such as management, engineering, and public policy.
- ECON 6800: Behavioral & Experimental Economics I (Fall)
- ECON 4340 / ECON 6340 Behavioral Financial Economics (Spring)
- ECON 4360 / ECON 6360 Experimental Economics (Fall & Spring)
Publications
The following is a selection of recent publications in Scopus. Billur Aksoy has 9 indexed publications in the subjects of Economics, Econometrics and Finance, Business, Management and Accounting, Decision Sciences.