AEA RCT Registry currently lists 8053 studies with locations in 167 countries.
Providing financial incentives to encourage behavioral change is increasingly common: policymakers pay people to exercise, to study more, and maintain tree cover. In designing incentives for behavior change, there is frequently a tradeoff between motivating those with high and low costs of engaging in the behavior: whereas the optimal contract for high-cost individuals will have a large incentive or a low behavior target, the optimal contract for low-cost individuals will have a small incentive or a large behavior target. This project will investigate methods for targeting incentive contracts for behavioral change to individuals with heterogeneous behavior cost. In a randomized controlled trial among individuals with diabetes and prediabetes, we will experimentally evaluate two methods ...
Providing people with information about their health risk is an important part of the policy response to a public health crisis. However, the most effective way to present such information is unknown, particularly in light of behavioral biases people have. One such bias is over-optimism about one's health risk (i.e., a tendency to believe that one's risk is lower than it is), which has been documented in many settings and shown to lead to riskier behaviors. This study aims to test whether interventions that offset people’s over-optimism can improve the effectiveness of information provision. We do so in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, among a population that is particularly vulnerable to severe complications from COVID-19, namely diabetics and pre-diabetics and hypertensives, who ...
People often regard inequalities as more acceptable when they reflect differences in effort rather than luck. In practice, however, effort and luck are commonly intertwined and elements of luck decide whether there is even an opportunity to exert effort. We study redistributive behavior when it is common knowledge that luck completely determines whether an agent gets to work. Using survey experiments in general population samples in the United States and Sweden, we document how spectators tasked with redistributing income between agents largely ignore the fact that work status is exogenous, and grant working agents both more earnings and more utility than non-workers. One reason that this pattern arises seems to be that initial, pre-redistribution earnings act as a stronger reference po...
This study will investigate the phenomenon of strategic incompetence in the context of gendered differences in the allocation of low-promotability tasks in the workplace. Using a series of online experiments, it will explore whether individuals strategically feign incompetence to avoid being asked to perform undesirable tasks again. Our findings will contribute to understanding gender dynamics in task allocation in the workplace.
We organize one-day Model United Nations conferences as Conferences of the Parties (COP) to study climate change negotiations under two different negotiation protocols.
This is a follow up to a lab study we conducted previously. The abstract of the lab study is this: A central factor when choosing an action is its causal effect on the outcome of interest. Yet, causal information is often lacking. People instead observe correlational or historical data, along with causal interpretations and recommendations provided by experts who frequently disagree with each other. Our laboratory experiments study choice in such settings, where beliefs concern the structure of the data-generating process rather than merely magnitudes. Roughly half of our subjects attempt to determine the fit of the causal interpretations to past data, as the literature on model persuasion assumes. We characterize the limits to their ability to do so. Half the subjects’ choices are ...
The impact evaluation seeks to evaluate the impact of the Farmer Field School (FFS) methodology of agricultural extension service provision and the electronic-voucher (e-Voucher) input subsidy system implemented by FAO in Mozambique. The FFS component seeks to i) understand and test different measures to strengthen the FFS model to disseminate information and empower farmers, and ii) evaluate initiatives to overcome the constraints faced by female community members to become FFS facilitators, as well as study the impact of facilitator gender on FFS outcomes. The e-Voucher component will assess the impact of e-Vouchers on the adoption of improved agricultural technologies and crop productivity, as well exploring which types of farmer benefit most from e-vouchers in the short and long run...
Conceived by researchers in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics and designed by LearnEnjoy, a French start-up specialised in the development of educational digital applications for children with specific needs, the School application aims to facilitate the integration of newly arrived allophone pupils by (i) providing them with personalised pedagogical content allowing them to progress at their own pace, (ii) training their teachers in the use of the application in the classroom and (iii) training their parents in the use of the application to increase their involvement in their children’s education. The full-scale project plans to randomize the deployment of the application and these trainings over the period 2023-2025. The impact will be assessed on (i) child development, learn...
Simplifying complex situations seems to deliver more favorable outcomes in many domains, including Earned-income Tax Credit take-up rate (Bhargava and Manoli 2015), portfolio investments (Carvalho and Silverman 2022), and taxes (Abeler and Jäger 2015). Hoppe et al. (2019) show that tax systems are judged complex by professional tax-advisors in most of the 100 countries they studied, while Blesse et al.(2019) 90% of Germans believe that the tax system needs to be substantially simplified. Recent literature in nudging for tax-compliance context shows that simplification can be even more effective than the deterrence nudge (De Neve et al. 2021; Cahlíková et al. 2021; Dwenger et al. 2016). Simplification of communication typically includes shortening the text, reducing the information con...
The COVID-19 pandemic made vaccine hesitancy the focus of global attention and concern and was listed as a global health threat by the WHO in 2019. In theory, a perfectly coordinated collective action can result in disease eradication. In reality, the "wait-and-see" strategy and self-centric behaviour precluded the elimination of COVID-19. Moreover, the "infodemic" around COVID-19 resulted in a WHO's call for increased resilience against misinformation. In this project, we propose developing and testing the impact of three online games designed around vaccine literacy, empathy, and misinformation training to increase vaccination intentions. We intend to bring evidence from countries with overall high/low vaccination rates (the UK and Slovakia to start with) to address concerns about the...