AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12034 studies with locations in 170 countries.
The explosion of information raises questions about how individuals search for and process it. To make better decisions, people search for relevant information, but this process is costly. Individuals must decide what kind of information to acquire and when to stop searching for more. This study uses online experiments to examine how the stake size and the complexity of information-search problems affect individuals' information search behavior. The experimental results are also used to distinguish between competing theoretical models of information search.
This study investigates the effectiveness of social media posts from small businesses.
Online news feeds are responsive attention markets: the content shown to users affects the interactions that determine future rankings. This feedback loop can generate cumulative advantage, concentrating attention among incumbent publishers and making outcomes sensitive to early luck. We propose a randomized parallel-world field experiment on the Graze Trending News feed to test how ranking design shapes these dynamics. Users are persistently assigned to one of nine worlds implementing three ranking rules: a status-quo local-interaction rule, a lightly smoothed interaction-per-impression rule, and a heavily smoothed interaction-per-impression rule. Because items decay out of the feed within 12 hours, the experiment consists of repeated short-lived attention markets. The primary outcomes...
Development interventions are often designed from independent perspectives that prioritize individualism, personal achievement and self-reliance, while individuals in non-Western countries are more likely to relate to interdependent values such as collective well-being, collaboration and traditions. Inspired by previous research, we have developed a “progress with your goals” curriculum that aims to help women to save. We created two versions, one incorporates an independent framing and the other incorporates an interdependent framing. Together with Tinh Thuong Microfinance Organization (TYM), a Vietnamese microfinance institution, we organize a field experiment to study the effect of the training and its different framings on women’s savings and preferences for competition.
Around the world, women continue to earn less than men and have worse labor market outcomes, and much of this gap emerges upon parenthood. One potential mechanism of penalties in the labour market for those parents that continue to work after childbirth is the unequal assignment and acceptance of low-promotability tasks, that is, tasks that benefit the organization but carry little weight in performance evaluations and promotion decisions. This study examines whether gender and parenthood shape both the supply and the demand of low-promotability tasks in a broad working population. We implement a survey experiment in Italy with workers and managers. On the supply side, workers are given the opportunity to complete an optional task that benefits (mainly) students but does not affect t...
This study uses data from four natural field experiments conducted with a gas utility in California. These experiments cover around 700,000 customers. Each experiment tests interventions that are aimed at increasing payment compliance and reducing the risk of disconnection. The first three experiments study reminder design at early stages of the arrears process. They ask if one more reminder increases repayment, whether SMS, email, and outbound calls perform differently, how framing nonpayment as an active choice affects collections, if adding a payment prompt to the regular bill matters, and whether reminders can be improved by making them shorter and more direct. The fourth experiment covers a much later stage in the collections process and examines whether it is more effective to ask...
This randomized controlled trial evaluates whether a bundle of behavioral messages, delivered during the rollout of an online training program, can increase course completion among online adult learners in Colombia. The study targets adult students who register for a fully asynchronous self-efficacy course composed of nine sessions and randomly assigns them to one of two groups: (1) a control group (NOINFO) that receives only minimal session-launch notifications during course delivery; and (2) a treatment group (INFO) that receives, for each new session, an email bundling a personalized commitment reminder referencing the student’s prior decision to enroll, information about the labor-market value of certified self-efficacy skills, and social proof in the form of completion counts and a...
What role does AI play in entrepreneurial decision making? We have partially explored this question by analyzing the impact of AI predictive tools on the performance of a large sample of US startups. We have exploited the release of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) which introduced AI predictive tools especially useful for mobile app developers. We found some evidence that post-GA4-release there is a boost in customer acquisition. The positive premium is largest for skilled human capital. These preliminary findings suggest that AI predictive tools are useful for complementing skilled human capital in formulating new testable business hypotheses, especially relevant for the detection of breakthroughs. To further explore our results obtained from large-scale data, we plan to conduct a lab expe...
This project studies how past exposure to violent conflict affects beliefs, preferences, and attitudes in later life. We implement a randomized priming design among Portuguese veterans of the Colonial War (1961–1974), a population for whom exposure to conflict is both historically meaningful and individually heterogeneous. We design and conduct a randomized priming experiment within a large-scale survey of Portuguese war veterans. The experiment exploits variation in the ordering of survey modules to manipulate the salience of conflict exposure at the time respondents report attitudes and preferences. All respondents first complete a set of baseline modules collecting socio-demographic and health information. After these initial modules, respondents are randomly assigned to one of two ...
This study investigates how people extract information from data when they have no prior knowledge of the underlying relationship between explanatory variables and the outcome. Participants observe datasets consisting of colored lights (on or off) and a sound, and must figure out a rule (mapping from the lights' status to the sound) to predict when the sound occurs. The study evaluates theoretical predictions about how the statistical properties of a dataset influence rule extraction, with participants recruited online via Prolific from the United Kingdom.