The experiment is already open and finishes on 31st January in Spain, where there are a thousand available simulations. It starts on 4th February and finishes on 14th February in Germany. In https://www.miria.es/simulacion-hipoteca-europea/ any person who lives in Spain and has or had a mortgage in the last 10 years can participate from his/her computer, and he/she will receive a payment of around an average of twelve euros. The participation, which takes between fifteen and thirty minutes long, consists in making from three to 10 anonymous decisions from any computer. At the end of the experiment the participants receive the payment via PayPal. In any case, all participants are guaranteed a minimum payment of five euros just for their participation.

The main researcher of the project is the LINEEX director, Penélope Hernández. José Manuel Pavía, Ignacio Alastrué, Rebeca Parra, Neus Planells and Sergio Sapiña, researchers from the Universitat de València, work with her. According to professor Hernández, “since participants perform an experiment that provides them with payments based on the decisions they make and these are always encouraged, they will be aligned with their actual preferences. Thereby it is possible to study their real behaviour and dismiss theoretical hypotheses. Imagine the mortgage suitable for you, and not the other way around."

About LINEEX

LINEEX is the laboratory of the ERICES (Interdisciplinary Research Structure for Economic and Social Behaviour of the Universitat de València) and an international reference in studying, understanding, predicting and quantifying the behaviour of people when they interact in economic and social contexts. For that purpose they design controlled situations (that is to say, experiments) in which the participants are invited to make individual or collective decisions economically encouraged achieving the linking of the actions with a tangible result. Apart from their strictly research work, LINEEX develops the research projects of more than two hundred researchers from twenty countries and it is an example of transference of research knowledge to public institutions and private enterprises.