AEA RCT Registry currently lists 5030 studies with locations in 160 countries.
We conduct a vignette-based survey experiment to assess the perceived fairness of considering race in a hiring decision. Our vignettes illustrate two canonical forms of discrimination studied by economists: taste-based and statistical discrimination, plus two sub-types of each. In addition, we will randomly reverse the races of the discriminator and discriminatee. These interventions will allow us to estimate how the type of discriminatory action and race of the persons involved affect the perceived fairness of discriminatory actions. They will also allow us to assess the appropriateness of three broad models of perceived fairness in this context: utilitarian social preferences, in-group bias, and rules-based ethics. To our knowledge our study will be the first to assess the conditi...
Study about the impact of content moderation of social media on consumer surplus
Physical inactivity is one of the four major risk factors for non-communicable diseases (WHO 2016). Decisions about engaging in physical activity involve making trade-offs between immediate costs and future benefits suggesting that time preference (how present or future oriented an individual is) and present bias (the enhanced significance an individual attaches to immediate outcomes) may play a part in how these decisions are made. Despite demonstrated correlational associations between physical activity and time preference and present bias, to date, time preference and present bias have not been taken into account when designing interventions to increase physical activity. Within economics the quasi-hyperbolic model (Laibson 1997) is currently used to model such intertemporal decisi...
Over usage of screen time such as cell phones can significantly reduce productivity. One important reason for the over usage of phones can be the lack of self-control. Commitment devices such as productivity or screen control apps have been developed to help people to overcome self-control problems. Yet, the number of users who adopt such a commitment device remains limited. This project aims at understanding the reasons for the low take-up rate of the commitment device. In particular, we test the hypothesis that individuals may underestimate their screen time usage and therefore lack motivation to download and use the app. We design information intervention mechanisms that aim at increasing the awareness of the problem of over usage of screen time and thereby promoting the interest i...
While the significance of narrative thinking has become increasingly recognized by economists, very little empirical research has documented its consequences for economically significant behaviors and outcomes. We address this gap in one important domain: valuations. In two online experiments, participants either told the story of an item they owned (mug in study 1, hat in 2) or listed its characteristics and were then offered the opportunity to sell it via an incentive-compatible procedure. The narrative treatment led to substantially higher selling prices (20-80% increase) and nearly doubled unwillingness to sell rates. The impact of different narrative types was also explored.
Financial literacy is an essential life skill that is found to be not adequate enough even among the adult population (Lusardi and Mitchell, 2014). Students often start their financially independent lives at the university, and therefore financial education becomes timely. Despite this, studies concerning tertiary education settings are scarce. In this study, we seek to fill this gap by an intervention that includes a new online freshman course of financial education tailored to the first-year students of the University of Vaasa. The aim of this course is to improve the financial management skills of the university students so that they would be able to conduct independent financial lives.
We study whether fairness preferences are different for intra- and inter-generational settings. In our survey, respondents will be asked to decide whether to redistribute income between a pair of workers who will be allocated unequal earnings in a hypothetical scenario. The respondents will be randomly assigned to one of three treatments (the 1950s treatment, 1970s treatment, and 1990streatment), where the treatments only differ with respect to the generation of one of the two workers who do not receive pre-redistribution earnings.
We implemented a randomized experiment in Romania to elucidate how messages, including general reminders and peer information, impact saving in an upper-middle income setting. We randomly selected 540 farmers from a rural region of Romania to participate in our study. Each participant was presented with an offer to join our experimental home-savings account and informed that after three months, the research team would revisit to observe the total accumulated savings and pay one percent interest on the balance. At baseline, all participants were asked whether they would like to set a savings goal and if so, how much they wished to save over the following months. In addition, participants were randomized into three groups. In the first group, participants received a general text message ...
This research studies how survey design affects transmission of sensitive information within organizations. We conduct a phone-based survey experiment with workers at two garment factories in Bangladesh to study how survey design affects their willingness to report misbehavior by managers, including threats, physical harassment, and sexual harassment. We experimentally vary whether the survey elicitation method provides plausible deniability when asking sensitive questions. In particular, building on Chassang and Padró i Miquel (2018) and Chassang and Zehnder (2019), we use hard garbling to provide plausible deniability by exogenously distorting survey responses. We also experimentally vary the extent to which the survey enumerator builds rapport with the surveyed individual and the lev...
We study the effect of stochastic rewards on workers' decisions to continue working.