AEA RCT Registry currently lists 11627 studies with locations in 170 countries.
This experiment plans to explore how behavioral tools affect parents' redemption rate of an online gift card. From 2022 to 2023, the About Technology in Math Education Project (About TIME) by us, the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at the University of Chicago, recruited over 1000 families of preschoolers in the Chicago area for a lab experiment and a field experiment to study if educational technology benefits preschoolers' math learning experience. We offered participants online gift cards to incentivize participation. The values of gift cards include $25, $40, and $75. As of April 2024, 283 family parents had yet to redeem the gift cards. To increase the gift card redemption rate with two behavioral approaches, we plan to separate these parents into one treatment group and one ...
Our paper models the decision to seek low-dose CT (LDCT) lung cancer screening. Because 80$\%$ of lung cancers are caused by cigarette smoking, we build a dynamic structural model in which screening and smoking are chosen simultaneously. Screening has the potential to identify early-stage lung cancer, when it is potentially treatable, and it alleviates uncertainty about the true lung cancer state. At the same time, screening is costly in both pecuniary and non-pecuniary terms, and it is not perfect in the sense that false positives may lead to unnecessary care. Smoking generates utility, particularly for those with significant and recent smoking histories, but it also increases the risk for both lung cancer and other chronic conditions. Our goal is to estimate the model and to simulate ...
Individuals investing their savings need to decide how risky a portfolio they want to hold. Riskier portfolios offer higher expected returns but are also more volatile, a trade-off that is important to keep in mind when planning to withdraw funds at a specific point in time. These considerations become especially relevant in old age, when accumulated savings need to be transformed into a steady stream of income. Information on financial products, such as Key Information Documents (KIDs), often communicate risks using verbal categories (e.g. “very conservative” or “very risky”) for different ranges of risk. Effective communication requires a shared understanding of these labels between investors and financial institutions. In this explorative study we test which ranges of risk individual...
This pre-registered study evaluates whether partisan disbelief—the tendency for partisans to perceive political outgroups as less knowledgeable—persists when respondents face monetary incentives for accuracy. We field a U.S. online survey with a sample size of 1,500, mirroring the baseline study design, and elicit (i) respondents’ own true/false judgments and confidence on a set of simple factual statements and (ii) their beliefs about the accuracy rates of different social groups in answering those same statements. The experiment randomizes monetary incentives at the belief-elicitation stage: prior to reporting perceived accuracy rates, half of respondents are informed that they can receive a $1 bonus with a probability that decreases in the absolute distance between their stated belie...
This study investigates the impact of large language model (LLM)-based chatbots on the labor market, focusing on their potential to reduce performance gaps between low- and high-skilled workers. Our experiment recruits participants with diverse skill levels, defined by educational attainment, and evaluates their performance in a task. The treatment group will complete this task with the assistance of an LLM-based chatbot, while the control group will complete it without any assistance. We will examine the differences between high- and low-skilled individuals in terms of how LLM assistance affects performance in the task.
Governments are increasingly complementing traditional audit-based enforcement with consumer-targeted interventions that enlist citizens in monitoring tax compliance. Among these, consumer receipt lotteries—programs that reward shoppers with entry into prize draws for submitting verified sales invoices—aim to strengthen the enforcement chain by encouraging consumers to demand formal receipts. Yet rigorous evidence on their effectiveness and interaction with administrative enforcement remains limited. We conduct the first randomized field experiment of a consumer receipt lottery in the hospitality sector of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, where business eligibility for the lottery is randomly assigned and cross-randomized with priority-enforcement status within the tax authority. We additi...
Schistosomiasis, the second most socioeconomically-burdensome neglected tropical disease globally, is caused by snail-transmitted flatworms that penetrate human skin. It originates in the aquatic ecology of rural communities, defies control efforts, reinforces poverty, and damages children’s health and education advancement because even when provided drugs to clear the infections, humans quickly get re-infected when they return to snail-infested waterbodies. A newly-identified solution synergistically leverages feedback in socio-environmental systems through targeted aquatic vegetation harvest at community water access points where most infections occur (Rohr et al., Nature, 2023). The next challenge is how to scale and sustain that solution. If successful, the low-cost, information-bas...
We study how pharmacies and clinics in Western Kenya make decisions that are critical to local health outcomes and antimicrobial resistance, such as the appropriateness of provided medications, diagnostic efforts, diagnostic accuracy, and the provision of partial dosages. We send standardized patients in multiple visits to a sample of 200 providers where we randomly vary the standardized patient's reported symptoms, willingness to provide symptoms, drug requests, and expressed price sensitivity. We plan to assess whether the actions a standardized patient takes influences the provider's willingness to ask diagnostic questions, the recommended drug, and the transaction price.
As climate change intensifies, extreme heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe, disproportionately affecting outdoor gig workers who lack labor protections and are paid based on output. In India’s booming gig economy, delivery workers face prolonged exposure to heat with limited means to adapt. This project will evaluate whether small, timely cash transfers can help these workers cope with extreme heat. During the peak summer months in Delhi and Gurgaon, India, we will randomly assign some workers to receive a cash transfer each time a heatwave is declared. We will track work activity and health symptoms through weekly surveys. The goal is to assess whether this support helps workers maintain productivity and reduce heat-related health issues. The findings will offer actionable...
How well informed are job seekers about the wages and other amenities offered by different jobs? When deciding which jobs to apply for, how do they weigh wages against other characteristics of the applied-for jobs? Does poor information distort job seekers’ search and application behavior? To answer these questions, we conduct a survey with an embedded randomized treatment among recent graduates from education programs in Denmark. We tailor the survey to each education program, so that respondents are asked about three specific types of jobs that are relevant, given their educational background. The first part of the survey elicits beliefs about average i) entry-level wages at the job type level, ii) success rates of applications, iii) wages five years after starting a career in a ...