Online LABEX experiments

All submissions must be completed via the HEC Lausanne Research Platform.

You will be asked to fill out a short general form about your study so that the Platform can define which submissions and documents are required for your study. You will then be accompanied and guided through the administrative process.

At least four weeks before running your experiment, you need to fill in an Ethical Submission for your experiment and then wait to get approval from the Commission for Ethics in Research (CER-HEC). The response time is a maximum of one week.

Be aware that any research run by an HEC researcher that involves human participation or that could raise ethical issues needs to get prior approval from the CER-HEC.

At the latest three weeks before launching your experiment, you need to complete a Financial Submission for your experiment.

The LABEX coordination team will check that everything is in order and will transfer it to the HEC Financial Service for approval (max. one week).

For your information, online experiments can be remunerated either via cash payments or via bank transfers. However, we strongly recommend that subjects are paid via the digital bank transfer payment procedure, in order to simplify the process as much as possible for participants. You will find all the information about the different payment methods on the Research Platform in the FAQ section, under "Participants' Remuneration Management".

Keep in mind that for online studies it is possible to remunerate your subjects via a lottery system. You can also find more information about this payment procedure on  the Research Platform. The LABEX team is happy to provide you with more information on this type of remuneration and which online studies are eligible for it.

At least two weeks before running your experiment, you need to fill in a Logistical Submission. The Logistical Submission allows you to specify the organizational details of the experiment and provides guidance to the LABEX coordination team in the participants' recruitment process.

In the weeks leading up to the launch of your experiment, create and test the survey or platform you will need for your study. For your information, we provide researchers with softwares for conducting experiments, such as oTree, zTree and Qualtrics, as well as technical support on request.

Please ensure that you do not exceed the time limit indicated on the Consent form for the entire experiment. The time limit for the experiment includes both the reading of the Consent form by the participants and the experiment itself.

At least 2 days prior to the launch of your study, send us a link to the survey/ platform that participants will need to access in order to participate in the experiment.

• On the day of the launch of the study, we will send out the link to the entire subject pool or parts of it (depending on the number of participants needed).

• The invitation email will always contain a response deadline. If you have achieved the required response numbers before that date, please close the survey/ platform. It is necessary to continuously monitor the response numbers, especially during the first 24h after the invitation email has been sent out, as response numbers can sometimes rapidly increase.

• Please make sure that you ask participants to indicate their ORSEE e-mail address in the consent form, so that you can contact them later about the remuneration and so that the administrative management can be simplified.

Please send the list of respondents to the LABEX coordination team as often as agreed so that we can follow up on your experiment and send reminders or have the final participants list.

The list should be structured in three columns as follows:  "First name"/"Last name"/"Email". This will allow us to upload the list directly to our recruitment platform.

At the latest at the end of the week of the experiment (or at the end of each week of the experiment for those lasting several weeks), certain financial documents need to be sent to HEC Financial Service. You can have an overview of what documents you'll have to hand in on the Research Platform in the FAQ section, under "What is the procedure for financial closure of a LABEX-online experiment? ".

You'll also find some of the document templates on the Research Platform.

If you experienced any problems or surprises (positive or negative) during the experiment management, please report this information to the LABEX team via the satisfaction survey that will be sent to you, even if these problems did not interfere with your experiment.

If deemed necessary, you can schedule a feedback meeting with the LABEX team to discuss the experiment.