AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12586 studies with locations in 171 countries.
Smallholder farmers face substantial production risk, yet their adoption of agricultural insurance remains persistently low. This project studies an overlooked behavioral mechanism behind this puzzle: farmers perceive the insurance premium as "wasted" money when no loss occurs. In a lab-in-the-field experiment with smallholder grape growers in Northern Peru, participants make incentivized adoption decisions over two risk-management tools: insurance, which charges a premium in every state, and an emergency loan, which charges only when a loss occurs — so its cost can never feel wasted. Both tools are offered at full cost and with an identical proportional (50%) cost reduction. If the wasted-premium perception depresses insurance demand, the cost reduction should raise insurance adoption ...
Among the forcibly displaced are 26 million refugees, 60% of whom have been living in exile for more than five years (UNHCR, 2020). These prolonged situations call for sustainable solutions, such as creating livelihood opportunities that help refugees achieve self-reliance, integrate with host communities, and contribute to a vibrant economy. To support this, organizations have introduced various interventions, including providing financial services to refugees (UNHCR, 2020). Credit products are designed to reduce households’ exposure to risk and boost investments in income generating opportunities, which translate into direct investments in their host community. The goal of this work is to understand the material and psycho-social benefits of microcredit for refugees and host-communiti...
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This project proposes a field experiment aimed at understanding how policy-makers engage with evidence on the productivity impacts of AI. We also posted a private pre-analysis plan which will be made public after the study has concluded.
The scale of fake news and misinformation is constantly growing in our hyper-connected world, which may have grave economic and societal consequences. For example, fake news and rumors can manipulate elections, threaten public health, and hype up (or down) investors leading to artificial market disturbances and instability. Designing appropriate social and economic policies in order to combat fake news and to improve the resilience of individuals, institutions, and markets to misinformation calls for a systematic investigation into the underlying cognitive, psychological, and institutional determinants of the belief in falsehoods and resistance to factual information. In this project, we aim to investigate the role of cognitive ability, overconfidence, and motivated reasoning (due to pa...
Behavioral feedback interventions typically promote conservation by providing separate reports for individual resources such as electricity, gas, and water. We study whether integrating this information into a single communication improves household conservation. In collaboration with a large Italian multi-utility, we conduct a randomized controlled trial involving approximately 190,000 residential customers who already receive digital Home Reports for at least two resources. Customers assigned to treatment continue receiving the standard resource-specific reports and additionally receive a Consolidated Home Report (CHR), which summarizes overall environmental performance through a single Ecoscore while preserving resource-specific information. The primary outcome is standardized poo...
Including informal workers in social security programs is an important challenge in the developing world. Countries such as Indonesia have designed workplace accident and death insurance programs targeted at this group, which require monthly payment of subsidies, but retention in these programs is low. In partnership with the Government of Indonesia (GoI), we conduct a randomized evaluation testing the effect of different interventions on the retention of informal workers in voluntary insurance programs. Specifically, we test two types of interventions: subsidies and offers to set up automatic person-to-government (P2G) payments ("auto-debit"). Automatic P2G payments are a promising strategy to increase retention in voluntary insurance programs, as they may promote financial inclusion b...
Advice as verbal communication, plays an important role in the functioning of organizations but is hard to assess and measure precisely. In this study we plan to measure advice-giving ability of individuals in a novel abstract setting by randomly assigning advice from a singlw advisor to many advisees, resulting in a quantitative measure of advice-giving skill. Then for the same advisors we will measure their advice-giving in a more naturalistic setting, resulting in a qualitative measure of advice-giving skill. We will explore if the quantitative measure and the qualitative measure correlate strongly, despite different surface features, a positive finding would suggest that we are measuring a real, transferable individual difference. Moreover, we will explore if advising skill is dist...
This study investigates behavior in first-price common-value auctions with fixed-equity contracts. Subjects will participate in laboratory sessions in groups of three, completing 30 rounds of the “wallet game” in which each bidder receives an independent private signal and the project value equals the sum of signals. Within each round, the seller requires the winner to pay both their cash bid and an equity share of the realized value, with the equity rate randomized across 0%, 20%, 40%, and 60%. In addition, a between-subject treatment varies how point earnings are converted to cash: in the baseline, conversion is linear, while in the treatment it becomes concave, thereby inducing effective risk aversion.
This study aims to experimentally test whether financial constraint, attractiveness of worker benefits, and information and behavioural frictions are significant barriers to social security participation.