SimTrade
SimTrade is a pedagogical tool about financial markets available on the website simtrade.com. SimTrade proposes market simulations: in a fictitious but realistic way, SimTraders can send orders to buy or sell stocks within predefined and reproducible scenarios. The originality of SimTrade is to simulate not only orders sent by SimTraders but also the realistic behavior of other traders, the evolution of financial asset prices, and the events of firms during the simulation. In such a complete environment, SimTraders have a direct impact on the market.
Beyond pedagogy, SimTrade is also a research project to better understand the behavior of individuals in terms of financial decisions. Market simulations allow to run experiments with the added value of contextualization and personalization. Applied to simulation data generated by SimTraders, data analytics provide insight about the behavior of individuals.
The Gender & Finance project uses the innovative SimTrade application to run experiments to better understand the gender dimension in financial markets.
Center of Pedagogical Research and Innovation of Paris (CIRPP)
The Center of Pedagogical Research and Innovation of Paris (CIRPP) belongs to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the region Paris Ile-de-France. Its goal is to describe and analyze pedagogical activities (in particular teacher-student interactions, pedagogical methods, changes in practice, etc.) within the network of schools of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Paris Ile-de-France (CCIP IdF) to which ESSEC Business School belongs.
The Gender & Finance project received the support of the CIRPP. In particular, from September 2014 to June 2016, the founders benefited from the collaboration with sociologist Professor Descoutures. This collaboration has pushed the project founders to introduce gender in finance education following a reflexive approach, to think about gender using a sociological approach, and to question the research design thanks to regular interactions with colleagues and, most critically, with students themselves.
ESSEC Business School
ESSEC is a leading Eurpoean business school, and one of the foremost Grandes Ecoles in France. ESSEC offers a full-fledged curriculum: master’s degree programs in Management and Finance, MBAs, Executive MBAs, Ph.D programs, bachelor’s programs and a broad variety of specialized master’s degrees. It has a student body of approximately 5,000 people on campus, a strong alumni network of 50,000, and a faculty of 140 professors. ESSEC was the first business school outside North America to be accredited by the AACSB in 1997. Its flagship program, the Master of Science in Management (Grande Ecole) is ranked in the top 3 business schools by the Financial Times.
The Gender & Finance project was presented to students, staff, professors and alumni during ESSEC Involvement week (November 2016). Experiments in behavioral finance using SimTrade application were also run in the KLab with students.