AEA RCT Registry currently lists 11821 studies with locations in 170 countries.
This research project aims to understand to what extent information about a financial product, when provided either to men or women, affects spouses’ beliefs and attitudes towards the financial product, product purchase decisions, and intra-household information sharing, cooperation and conflict outcomes. We conduct a randomized controlled trial among 3100 pastoral households in Kenya and Ethiopia. We randomize, at the household-level, the gender of the spouse that receives information about an index insurance and savings financial product through video interventions. Additionally, we cross-randomize whether or not the household member that is targeted with information can directly share the information with their spouse, by requesting the intervention team to also show the video to the...
This experimental design is implemented in collaboration with the NGO Chile Transparencia. Beginning in February 2020 the Chilean Comptroller General Office rolled out 167 audits in municipalities throughout the country. The treatment consists of the audit report for each municipality in addition to a short information video that highlights the extent to which the municipality has high or low malfeasance counts. We have recruited approximately 49,000 online subjects from these municipalities (plus a control group of 177 non-audited municipalities). All 10,000 subjects will receive a pre-treatment survey measuring their pre-treatment beliefs regarding corruption in their municipality. Within each audited municipality subjects randomly assigned to the treatment will receive a v...
Understanding the mechanisms that explain altruistic actions has been subject to research for decades. To extend our knowledge of altruism in more complex situations, we investigate the role of social cohesion on altruistic transfers in network settings. To this end, we elicit a social network of friends and subsequently measure the relationship levels between them. Then, conditional on the elicited social network and relationships, we measure a series of mechanisms as potential mediational factors between social cohesion and transfer decisions with more than two players involved. Our set-up allows us to identify the degree to which individuals embedded in social networks take into account subsequent transfers between other parties, network information and individual identity.
A growing body of research, pioneered by Dana et al. (2007), has confirmed the prevalence of strategic ignorance: if acting in one’s own interest might harm the interest of someone else, many individuals prefer not to know whether interests conflict or align; moreover, if given the option to stay ignorant, subjects tend to behave more selfishly. In particular, Dana et al. (2007) found that in a binary version of the dictator game, only 26% of subjects chose the selfish alternative when payoffs were known. However, when dictators had to click a button to reveal whether there was a conflict of interest between themselves and the recipient, many abstained from revealing this information, and as much as 63% of those who actually faced conflicting interest now chose the selfish option. Alt...
This study assesses the effectiveness of an information-based intervention designed to increase maize farmer engagement with sustainable land management (SLM) training and the adoption of SLM practices in the district of Pèrèrè in North-East Benin. Farmers in the study area face declining soil fertility resulting in substantial yield losses. The intervention provides a randomly selected subset of farmers with personalized information on the status of their soil, the implications for yields as well as recommendations on how to prevent further soil degradation. The study examines whether this information can increase participation in an upcoming SLM training participation and encourage uptake of taught practices.
We evaluate the effectiveness of a sustainable land management (SLM) training program implemented by a local NGO in Pèrèrè, north-eastern Benin. The region faces severe land degradation and declining soil fertility due to reduced rainfall, intensive farming practices, and increased use of chemical pesticides and mineral fertilizers. The intervention targets 800 maize farmers across 25 villages and will take place before and during the growing season 2026. The program includes training sessions on specific SLM practices delivered before the rainy season March-April 2026, as well as practical follow-ups in the following months on a plot identified by each farmer as particularly degraded. The 25 participating villages are randomly selected from the 50 maize-producing villages in Pèrèrè. We...
Prevailing gender norms may discourage women from entering higher-paying, male-dominated sectors by imposing social stigma and family pressure. This study implements a lab-in-the-field experiment in Mozambique to measure these social constraints and to test whether exposure to motivational narratives can influence vocational preferences. The sample consists of married women eligible for a forthcoming vocational training program. In the first stage, participants complete a structured hypothetical choice exercise in which they choose between female-dominated and male-dominated job options that differ only in income. The wage differential increases stepwise, allowing identification of a switching point that captures the implicit “social tax” associated with entering male-dominated activ...
This project will explore whether seasonal forecasts enable pastoralists to cope with long dry seasons in Turkana, Northern Kenya. This is a timely concern as the long dry season in East Africa is projected to become longer in a warming climate. (Wainwright et al., 2021) We will achieve this using an experimental evaluation of a feasibly scalable intervention co-created with local stakeholders and policymakers. Our project will test whether information reached households, whether it changed beliefs and desired actions, and finally whether it improved livelihoods and reduced losses and conflict.
This study examines how people develop trust in AI-driven resource allocation systems leveraging housing photos as a context. Using a hypothetical scholarship allocation scenario that uses AI to rank applicants based on photos of their house, we explore how the photos-based approach can help people understand both AI’s strengths and potential biases. We investigate how different types of AI errors affect trust across participants from varying socio-economic backgrounds. This work provides evidence-based insights for organizations considering AI adoption in high-stakes resource allocation decisions.
We investigate the role of customer reviews and host demographics in statistical discrimination within the sharing economy (specifically in online rental markets). Using a controlled experiment in an Airbnb-like setting, we measure how a host's race, a host's gender, and customer reviews interact to affect accommodation demand. We create fictitious listings using scraped data from Airbnb and systematically vary host characteristics across three primary dimensions in a fully crossed 2x2x2 factorial design: Host Race (Black/White), Host Gender (Man/Woman), and a Review factor (High/Low). To isolate specific mechanisms of review-based discrimination, the exact nature of the Review factor varies across three between-participant treatments, manipulating either review quantity, positive infor...