AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12552 studies with locations in 171 countries.
Our experiment involves participants designing a product (a web game) with an AI coding agent to sell to other participants.
We study how identity salience affects preferences. In an online survey with approximately 2,000 respondents, we randomly assign participants to watch one of two short videos before completing incentivised economic tasks. After the video, respondents complete three tasks.
This research project aims at investigating the effect of unconditional cooperation on monetary contributions to public good. According to existing evidence on cooperative types, especially based on influential works such as Fischbacher et al, 2001; Gachter, 2006 and Fischbacher and Gachter, 2006, individuals are mainly classified into two categories that is conditional cooperators and free riders. Conditional cooperators are individuals who contribute based on the observation of the others’ contributory levels or based on the belief that the others will contribute. Free riders are by definition individuals who never contribute and therefore reap the benefits of the others’ commitment and efforts. These represent the two most common cooperative types. Less observed cooperative types are...
We will conduct a large-scale online survey with a quota-representative sample of approximately 7,500 German adults. Using the case of rent control – a prominent and highly salient price-control policy on which economists and the public often appear to disagree – we study people’s understanding of the effects (mental models) of price control policies and the limits of expert persuasion. Our aims are to: a) elicit and characterize the mental models that individuals hold about the effects of stricter rent control, using both open-ended (unstructured) and structured elicitation, and relate these mental models to individuals’ economic literacy; b) test whether exposure to economists’ economic narratives against stricter rent control shifts individuals’ mental models and their support for ...
An incentivized experiment is designed to study how decision-makers build and revise contingency plans in a stylized dynamic portfolio choice task. Participants are asked to manage a compounding investment in one risk-free and one risky assets over three periods. First, participants build a complete contingency plan by choosing the amount to invest in the risky asset in every possible state. After observing each of the first two returns, they may keep or revise their choices for the states that remain reachable. The risky asset returns are randomly generated with equal probabilities of gains and losses at every stage. We test whether participants increase the risky asset share relative to their previously submitted plan after a gain and after a loss. Such revisions resemble house-money ...
Maize prices in Malawi rise sharply between the harvest and the lean season, but the size of the increase varies widely across years, exposing both net buyers and net sellers to substantial price risk in their main staple. No standard financial product to insure rural households against this risk is widely available. We elicit incentivized willingness to pay (WTP) for maize options contracts — calls that cap the price households pay and puts that floor the price they receive — among 224 households in Zomba district, Malawi. Each household completes Becker–DeGroot–Marschak elicitations for six contracts covering the 2026-2027 lean season: calls and puts at each of three strike prices. One contract is then randomly selected and offered at a randomly drawn premium; households purchase cove...
We experimentally test whether individuals' causal belief systems are well described by the workhorse model of the literature on causal cognition and misspecified mental models: Causal Bayesian Networks (CBN). We ask two questions. First, are belief systems rationalizable by the theory that individuals process data through the lens of a CBN or a distribution over CBNs? Second, do individuals' beliefs and choices exhibit the comparative statics predicted by the literature on misspecified learning? Participants interact with computer-generated systems involving binary variables, make incentivized choices, and report beliefs about causal relationships.
Do individuals remediate negative externalities out of forward-looking concern for outcomes or backward-looking feelings of personal responsibility? I design a lab experiment that disentangles these mechanisms by holding present restoration consequences constant while exogenously varying the extent to which past harm was self-caused or externally generated. By systematically varying the unit price of restoration, I identify individual willingness to pay to restore self-caused versus other-caused harm. Finally, I estimate a structural random utility model via Maximum Likelihood to characterize preference heterogeneity across selfish, purely altruistic, purely clean-slate, and altruistic types who exhibit a responsibility premium for self-caused harm.
Non-heterosexual identities and attitudes toward homosexuality are commonly measured using direct survey questions, which may be affected by social desirability bias. This study examines the extent of this bias in France using three double list experiments implemented within the nationally representative ELIPSS panel. The experiments measure (i) heterosexual identification, (ii) acceptance of having a gay son, and (iii) acceptance of having a lesbian daughter. Comparing prevalence estimates obtained through indirect and conventional direct questions will provide estimates of the magnitude of response bias. The study will then examine whether response bias varies across respondents’ characteristics, whether acceptance differs according to the gender of the hypothetical child, and whether...
Many employees contribute too little to their employer-sponsored retirement plans to obtain the full employer match, even when doing so would generate a large and immediate financial return. A broader research project examines whether this behavior reflects informational frictions—such as uncertainty about how much to save or misunderstanding of the employer match—or frictions associated with engaging in and completing the contribution decision. In a field experiment with administrative contribution outcomes, personalized savings guidance and match clarification changed employees’ reported beliefs but did not measurably increase contributions, whereas a small, same-day engagement reward increased actual contributions. Because that field intervention combined a monetary reward with a sam...