AEA RCT Registry currently lists 1830 studies with locations in 119 countries.
Will a person in need of help be more likely to be helped when there are one or several potential helpers? Dozens of experiments have led social psychologists to conclude that the answer to this question depends entirely on the situation. This project uses game theory to predict in what situations one potential helper is more likely to provide help than a group of several potential helpers, and in what situations the opposite is true. The theoretical model concludes that in situations where few potential helpers are willing to help, then help is more likely to be provided when many people can help. However, in situations where most potential helpers are willing to help, help is more likely to be provided when only one person can help. I test this model in a lab experiment.
"Nudges" have increasingly shown to be cost-effective tools for promoting a wide range of behaviors, from medication adherence to saving to energy efficiency. But most research evaluates one intervention in isolation on target outcomes. As such, we have little understanding of how campaigns might interact with one another, or whether they generate spillovers in unanticipated domains. This paper explores the hypothesis that such campaigns might interfere with one another due to limited attention. I propose a simple framework, motivated by a taxonomy of attention from the psychology literature that distinguishes between “internal” and “external” attention. I test the predictions of the framework using an experiment in which individuals receive combinations of messages and incentives for t...
The key objectives of this research are i) to test whether a scalable and cost-effective approach to closing the gap in management practices between developing and more developed countries can be implemented; and ii) to measure the impact of closing this management gap on firm productivity and profitability. It will do this by means of a randomized experiment in Colombia, which will allocate firms into three groups: a control group who just receive a diagnostic on their management practices, an individualized treatment group who receive one-on-one consulting to improve 5 different processes: Logistics, Human Resources, Finance, Marketing and Sales, and Production; and a treatment group in which management improvements will be implemented in a small group setting, analogous to agricultur...
Child Collegio Carlo Alberto in cooperation with Ufficio Pio will pilot a conditional cash transfer programme that will focus on providing information set of families with children. We will evaluate the effects of conditional cash transfer methods on the well-being of families with at least one child aged 0-6 years. We are using a different type of condition to those used in the international experiences: the transfer is not dependent on how it is used or its effects, but on exposure to information and guidance that could encourage choices potentially tackling poverty and fostering the families' well-being. The design of the evaluation is such that there will be one control group not receiving any transfer, a first treatment group of families receiving an unconditional cash tran...
Ensuring universal access to electricity is essential for global development. In the health sector, lack of reliable light and electricity is a major challenge for health workers when conducting deliveries at night. However, there is very little evidence of the impact of improving access to reliable electrification at maternity facilities on the quality of maternity care they provide. This stepped wedge cluster-randomized trial will evaluate the impact of a reliable light and electricity source - the "Solar Suitcase" - on outcomes of availability and brightness of light, the quality of maternal care provided, and health worker satisfaction. The study will take place in rural health facilities conducting deliveries in Uganda that lack access to reliable light and electricity. Data collec...
When workers make operational decisions, the firm's global knowledge and the worker's domain-specific knowledge complement each other. Oftentimes workers have the final decision-making power. Two key decisions a firm makes when designing systems to support these workers are: 1) what guidance to deliver, and 2) what kind of training (if any) to provide. We examine these choices in the context of mobile money platforms---systems that allow users in developing economies to deposit, transfer, and withdraw money using their mobile phones. Mobile money has grown quickly, but high stockout rates of currency persist due to sub-optimal inventory decisions made by contracted employees (called agents). In partnership with a Tanzanian mobile money operator, we perform a randomized controlled tri...
This Impact Evaluation studies to which extent procurement through PAE Framework Agreements impacts the quality, value-for-money, and delivery of school meals to students in Colombia. This study will perform a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of replacing such existing ad-hoc agreements between individual ETCs (subnational education districts) and ‘fundaciones’ with centrally-coordinated, standardized, and credibly-enforced framework agreement contracts. Additionally, as the involvement of school-level actors in the administration of contracts may play a role in determining the effectiveness of service delivery, this evaluation will also assess the impact of bottom-up accountability mechanisms by empowering teachers, parents, and students to enforce the terms of...
Girls and boys in developing countries are often exposed to a number of traditional practices that have strong, negative effects on their future, like for example child marriage and sexual initiation rituals. The measurement of the prevalence of these harmful traditional practices is particularly difficult due to social desirability biases and thus, reliable evidence is scarce. This research project measures the prevalence of different harmful traditional practices in Malawi, while explicitly accounting for social desirability bias by using a combination of advanced elicitation techniques. This not only provides us with an individual-specific measure for susceptibility to social pressure, but also allows us test interventions intended to mitigate these social forces. Further, we...
The study implements the Pay for Percentile (PFP) incentive system for primary class 6 (P6) math teachers in 151 government schools in rural Uganda. The intervention is designed to address two issues. First, teacher attendance and effort appear to be weak in many rural schools. Second, because the results of P7 leaving exams are publicized widely, schools face clear incentives to encourage weak P6 students to drop out. By comparing distributions of outcomes in the 151 treatment schools with outcomes in 151 control schools, we seek to determine whether PFP is an effective tool for improving teacher effort in ways that raise student achievement and mitigate educational triage.
Previous studies document both present bias and people's naivete about being subject to present bias. However, it is puzzling that naivete that pertains to everyday behavior and a stable trait of the individual can persist. Why do people not learn about their bias? Our experiment seeks to provide a first step to resolving this puzzle empirically. We investigate whether people are able to learn about their present bias if they have the opportunity to engage in an unpleasant task repeatedly. To this end, we develop a framework that allows us to quantify what it means to learn optimally from one's own behavior and to compare individuals' observed learning to this benchmark. In the experiment, subjects can complete two unpleasant tasks at two separate dates in the future. We elicit subj...