Experimental economist

Experimental economist

My Coursera adventures

I discovered the world of MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) when I enrolled on my first one in November of 2012. It was a course on Coursera platform called Introduction to Astronomy offered by Duke University and taught by Ronen Plesser. I got immediatelly hooked and was amazed about the variety of topics one could learn about. The journey through knowledge was both stimulating as well as addictive and lasted until the summer of 2015. I completed a range of courses during that time.

Surprising as it may sound, my Coursera endeavors helped me discover a new passion in research. One of the courses I took in Coursera was "A beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior" offered by Duke University and taught by Dan Ariely. It covered a range of topics where human behavior is systematically and predictably irrational. This course was a deciding factor in my decision to change academic field from mathematics and statistics to behavioural and experimental economics. It triggered a domino of choices that eventually lead me to the University of Amsterdam.

As a final note, I highly recommend taking online courses in fields that are far from the area of your own expertise. From my personal experience, they can really broaden your horizons.

All the courses I successfully completed during that time are below. They are 47 in total, it was addictive, admittedly I got hooked!

Economics & Finance

  • A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior (Duke University)
  • An Introduction to Marketing (University of Pennsylvania)
  • Behavioral Finance (Duke University)
  • Economics of Money and Banking (Columbia University)
  • Financial Engineering and Risk Management (Columbia University)
  • Game Theory I (Stanford University)
  • Game Theory II: Advanced Applications (Stanford University)
  • Gamification (University of Pennsylvania)
  • Introduction to Neuroeconomics (Higher School of Economics)
  • Model Thinking (University of Michigan)
  • The Global Business of Sports (University of Pennsylvania)
  • The Power of Macroeconomics (University of California, Irvine)
  • The Power of Microeconomics (University of California, Irvine)
  • Welcome to Game Theory (University of Tokyo)

Natural sciences

  • Animal Behaviour (University of Melbourne)
  • Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (University of Edinburgh)
  • Dinosaur Paleobiology (University of Alberta)
  • Introduction to Astronomy (Duke University)
  • Introduction to Programming with MATLAB (Vanderbilt University)
  • Science from Superheroes to Global Warming (University of California, Irvine)

Social sciences

  • Advertising and Society (Duke University)
  • The Ancient Greeks (Wesleyan University)
  • The Bible’s Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future (Emory University)
  • Conditions of War and Peace (University of Tokyo)
  • Democratic Development (Stanford University)
  • Greek and Roman Mythology (University of Pennsylvania)
  • History of Rock, Part One (University of Rochester)
  • History of Rock, Part Two (University of Rochester)
  • Magic in the Middle Ages (University of Barcelona)
  • Introduction to Philosophy (University of Edinburgh)
  • Introduction to Psychology (University of Toronto)
  • The Social Science of Wrongful Conviction (Pennsylvania State University)
  • Sports and Society (Duke University)
  • Terrorism and Counterterrorism (University of Leiden)
  • The Modern World: Global History since 1760 (University of Virginia)
  • Understanding Europe: Why It Matters and What It Can Offer You (HEC Paris)
  • Understanding Video Games (University of Alberta)

Mathematics & Statistics

  • Bayesian Statistics (University of California, Santa Cruz)
  • Case-Based Introduction to Biostatistics (Johns Hopkins University)
  • Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich)
  • Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp I (Johns Hopkins University)
  • Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp II (Johns Hopkins University)
  • Measuring Causal Effects in the Social Sciences (University of Copenhagen)
  • Probability (University of Pennsylvania)
  • Questionnaire Design for Social Surveys (University of Maryland)
  • Statistical Analysis of fMRI Data (Johns Hopkins University)
  • Statistics: Making Sense of Data (University of Toronto)