AEA RCT Registry currently lists 9974 studies with locations in 170 countries.
The current empirical work on temptation and self-control costs is limited to settings in laboratory settings and predominantly focused on existence claims. To bring decision theory in the field, we design customized food ordering platforms on which we invite participants for a challenge - following a carb- and meat-controlled diet for three consecutive days. Our dataset allows us to take an agnostic and comprehensive approach to measure temptation: we allow for any degree of commitment, from commitment to a single meal category to complete flexibility. Using information on the entire ordering over seven menus, we develop measures to study the source, strength and structure of temptation. More specifically, our design allows us to test for cumulative and stochastic temptation. We use de...
We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Switzerland to study the social and economic consequences of legalizing access to cannabis for recreational use. We are interested in how legal access to cannabis affects users’ social and economic well-being, involvement in criminal activities, and drug use patterns. We also evaluate the effects of a self-regulation program to prevent excessive cannabis consumption.
Discriminatory beliefs and practices against women within households and local communities are usually cited as a prominent reason for high levels of gender inequality prevalent in contemporary Indian society. While the presence and implications of discrimination against women and other minority groups in India has been extensively documented in the social science literature, there is a paucity of experimental evidence from the field. Within development economics, gender inequality is considered to be a barrier for economic development but to the best of my knowledge, there is a lack of field research on analyzing the behavioral patterns of discriminatory behavior against women. This experimental study is setup with the following objectives: 1) use lab-in-the-field games to identify t...
Adolescence is a key window for human development. Strategic timing of interventions during this life stage may seize opportunities and prevent risks; bolster the impact of earlier investments; and ease damages from previous adversity. Yet evidence on whether such programs can fulfill this potential, for which children, and through which channels, is scant, especially in low-resource settings, where 90% of the world’s 1.2 billion adolescents live. We rely on a cohort of ~2,400 adolescents. In 2015, this sample participated in a trial evaluating quality preschool education in Ghana. The program had sustained effects up to three years post-intervention, but its effects seemed to fade towards the end of primary school. In 2024, we re-randomised this sample at ~13 years to test a novel pare...
In countries with centralized admission systems, some applicants have access to outside options. This study aims to analyze how the presence of attractive outside options for some applicants affects the decisions of all applicants in a centralized admission system under the deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism. I consider two cases: 1) when the length of the ranked ordered list (ROL) of educational programs that applicants can submit is unconstrained, and 2) the case of constrained ROLs. For each of these cases, I also examine whether integrating the outside option into the centralized admissions system affects the decisions of applicants, as well as the characteristics of the resulting matchings. The preliminary findings are as follows. When the length of ROLs is constrained, contrar...
Intervention strategies such as monetary incentives and prosocial (donation-related) incentives have been proposed to encourage physical activity (e.g., walking), and numerous experiments have been conducted to evaluate their effectiveness. However, these interventions may influence not only physical activity but also other indicators, such as participants’ subjective health status and prosociality. Moreover, when corporations or local governments adopt these interventions to promote physical activity among employees or citizens and this fact becomes publicly known, it may also affect public perceptions of these organizations. Corporations and local governments may consider not only the expected effects of these interventions on physical activity but also their potential impact on pu...
Citizens exhibit interests for a variety of social contribution activities, including biodiversity conservation ones. However, it is difficult for one citizen to participate in multiple activities with the same effort. There are both activities in which they want to directly participate and activities in which they would be satisfied to be indirectly involved. In this study, we introduce a scheme whereby when people contribute to the activity in which they want to directly participate, another positive action also occurs in the social contribution activity in which they want to be indirectly involved. We experimentally test how much the scheme facilitates the former behavior. Specifically, we introduce a matching scheme whereby people post species information on a smartphone app r...
This study evaluates a migrant integration program administered in the city of Quelimane, Mozambique. The package consists of three main elements: access to a job-matching service, help setting up a mobile money account for sending remittances as part of a financial inclusion module, and general information about how to use government services and the city. For the job-matching service, operatives canvass the city to identify employment opportunities, and provides the contact information of potential employers to program recipients.
This project investigates the causes of under-reporting for college sexual assault by examining the impacts of both a survey technique designed to provide plausible deniability and the salience of social norms on reporting rates. I designed a 2x2 online survey experiment in which subjects complete two primary tasks on social norms and experience with sexual assault. In the social norm task, subjects complete an incentivized social norm elicitation exercise, where they predict the percentage of previous survey respondents (men and women) who agree with statements suggesting that women reporting sexual assault are partly responsible for what happened or are lying about the assault. In the experience task, subjects complete binary questions on their experience with either sexual assault pe...
This study investigates the impact of offering a Platinum credit card upgrade on customers' credit card usage behavior. By conducting a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 5,000 randomly selected customers eligible for a Platinum card upgrade, I aim to understand how the availability of enhanced rewards affects consumer spending patterns. The experiment consists of three stages: a pre-experiment survey to collect baseline data, a treatment phase where participants are randomly divided into treatment and control groups, and a data collection phase six months post-treatment. The treatment group is offered the option to upgrade to a Platinum card, while the control group is not. Our analysis will compare credit card spending, non-credit card spending, spending on reward categories,...