AEA RCT Registry currently lists 11640 studies with locations in 170 countries.
In many sub-Saharan African countries, stigma towards mental and neurological illnesses is widespread. This is partly reinforced by beliefs that certain conditions, such as epilepsy or schizophrenia, have a spiritual rather than biomedical root cause. Uncertainty about the origin of illness as well as about the treatment effectiveness of modern versus traditional or spiritual treatment can influence help-care seeking behavior and treatment choices. We conduct an online experiment in five sub-Saharan countries to study the prevalence of spiritual-origin beliefs of epilepsy and schizophrenia and to assess the uncertainty around treatment effectiveness of different health care providers. We then study the effect of two information treatments on these beliefs, uncertainties and treatment pr...
Diet-related diseases are a leading contributor to global morbidity, mortality, and rising health expenditures. Beyond direct health impacts, poor diets also impose large social and economic costs through lost productivity, increased healthcare demand, and long-term fiscal pressures on public systems. These challenges raise the importance of identifying behavioral mechanisms that systematically bias food choice and exploring how they can be leveraged to improve consumer diets. One such mechanism is attribution bias—the tendency for individuals to misattribute state-driven experiences to intrinsic product properties. While widely observed in behavioral studies, little is known about the internal mechanisms through which attribution bias shapes preferences, and whether this bias can be le...
Countries worldwide are accelerating the transition to renewable energy in pursuit of Net Zero targets. However, variable renewable sources such as solar and wind are inherently inflexible and cannot readily respond to short-term fluctuations in electricity demand. Residential consumers—who account for approximately one quarter of global energy consumption—therefore represent a substantial and underutilised source of demand flexibility. One approach to unlocking this potential is through demand response programmes that incentivise households to shift electricity consumption away from peak periods (e.g., 4:00–7:00 pm on weekdays) in exchange for financial rewards such as bill credits or free electricity hours. This study conducts a large-scale field trial in collaboration with a major UK...
This study examines whether experiencing a “future self” through a virtual reality (VR) avatar changes how people make decisions about climate-related actions. Participants will be randomly assigned to future experiences through VR or not. Participants experience a future version of themselves living in the year 2066 under more severe heat and other climate impacts. After the experience, participants answer short survey questions about how immersive the experience felt and how strongly the “future-self” perspective remains. The goal is to better understand whether VR-based future experiences can encourage more future-oriented and climate-conscious decision-making.
The study consists of a series of experiments on a large online platform for freelance work. The objectives are to i) identify employer preferences for worker characteristics and worker preferences for employer/job characteristics, ii) identify beliefs of employers about worker preferences and beliefs of workers about employer preferences, iii) identify differences between employer (worker) preferences and worker (employer) beliefs about those preferences, and iv) evaluate the importance of these information frictions on the platform and interventions to mitigate them. This will be achieved by creating hypothetical worker profiles and hypothetical employer job offers in which a rich set of characteristics are independently randomized. Real workers and employers recruited on the plat...
We investigate the attention and influence that scientific evidence receives in online settings. In an online experiment, participants in the role of "senders" view sets of articles based on research studies, and decide which articles to share and what content to provide alongside the article. We vary features of the articles and the communication process to shed light on the drivers of online attention to different types of evidence. In a separate experiment, participants in the role of "receivers" will choose which articles to click on to read more about.
Biased, overly pessimistic beliefs represent an important obstacle to the adoption of cost-effective policy instruments, such as carbon taxes. With a large survey experiment, we investigate the effectiveness, on impact and over time, of information provision about the functioning of carbon taxes. We aim to simulate the potential of an actual information campaign, including interactions among peers about the content of the campaign. Such information campaigns are widely used in European countries. We focus on one of the few such countries without its own domestic carbon pricing scheme, Italy.
Yemen is a deeply understudied context and is in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Solar panels in Yemen offer among the highest returns on productive development aid globally, yet uptake of subsidized loans for solar panels is remarkably low. Most households that acquire panels pay cash, even when zero-interest financing is available at a lower total cost. Both cost savings and environmental benefits are substantial. Yet loan-based development aid has remarkably low uptake compared with less-subsidized cash purchases. In this project, we explore the following question: How do conflict-affected preferences and beliefs shape decisions in contexts where resource constraints frequently bind, and savings are imperfectly fungible? What can these preferences and beliefs tell us...
This study investigates how individuals reason in complex economic environments involving indirect and feedback effects. Participants in an online experiment take part in a “transfer game” with three fictitious players and a fixed set of rules that determine how money moves between players over two or three rounds. In each game, participants predict how many coins one player will end up with and earn a bonus based on prediction accuracy. A key feature of the design is that participants do not see the full set of transfer rules directly. Instead, they can consult a simple calculator that reveals the consequence of a specific transfer rule they choose to look up. By observing both participants’ predictions and the information they choose to look up, we study how people simplify complex e...
The Swedish National Agency for Education (SNAE; Skolverket) introduced a targeted school improvement program for compulsory schools with persistently low student outcomes starting in fall 2025. The program aims to improve student achievement, instructional quality, and educational equity by providing customized professional development, coaching, and organizational support to schools with limited capacity for self-driven improvement. In collaboration with SNAE, the Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU) developed a selection mechanism. Targeted school providers (school districts) and eligible schools were identified using a needs index based on prior student achievement, student composition, and teacher qualifications. Within participating school distric...