AEA RCT Registry currently lists 4624 studies with locations in 159 countries.
We contrast two fundamental ways to learn and form expectations for businesses. On the one hand, we will provide evidence on firms’ ability to adapt through feedback, sometimes also called “local search” or “adaptive expectations”. This approach primarily reactive in nature. On the other hand, we will investigate the effectiveness of proactive learning and experimentation, an approach that is connected to concepts such as “hypothesis-driven search” and “anticipatory expectations”.
We study the competition for consumer attention between social media platforms. We run a field experiment that collects comprehensive data on the time usage of individuals as well as periodically collects psychological measures of well-being. We randomize restrictions to several prominent social media applications on subject's phones and utilize this to measure changes in subject's well-being and time usage. This randomization allows us to overcome a primary challenge with measuring substitution patterns in such markets where firms compete for consumer attention and are characterized by zero monetary prices. We utilize our experiment to characterize such substitution patterns, define relevant markets, and estimate a demand system for consumer attention.
Empathy is said to be the antidote to in-group bias. In this study we evaluate the causal effects of empathy training on elite civil servants in collaboration with the civil service administration and assess its impact on social preferences, bureaucratic performance, and thought leadership. Recent research suggests that emphasizing malleability of empathy as being key to behavioral change. In a factorial design, we also assess the impacts of emotional intelligence training, the impact of reading material whose content application is assessed via social emotional learning exercises. We also randomize econometrics book (mastering metrics) across the civil servants subject to their selection of the metrics book, where book on empathy serves as a placebo.
In a lab-in-the-field experiment I investigate to what extent spouses’ relative influence in household decision-making differ across decision domain. The sample consists of couples in rural Vietnam. In the experiment, spouses make individual and joint decisions with respect to an investment decision and a voluntary contribution decision to a local social fund for poor households in the village. I collect a rich set of household and individual characteristics as well as measures of beliefs and knowledge. I use the survey data collected to explore what background characteristic that determine spouses relative influence and to what extent these factors differ across decision domains. Of specific interest are measures of spouses’ responsibility for the household’s social relations construct...
The goal of this study is to determine the effectiveness of default nudges, direct payments, and lottery payments in increasing vaccine acceptance. We will conduct a single survey where participants are exposed to one of two choice architecture treatments and then one of two financial incentive treatments. In the choice architecture treatments participants will either see a default nudge treatment, where they must opt out of taking the vaccine by cancelling a premade appointment, or an active choice treatment, where they can choose to take the COVID-19 vaccine by making an appointment or going to a walk-in clinic. Participants will then see a direct payment treatment or a lottery treatment. We will determine the proportion of the student population that would take the vaccine under thes...
Research demonstrates that leaders vary extensively in their capabilities to scaffold human potential. Still, we have limited understanding of how different leadership behaviors cause workers to be engaged and motivated to work hard and smart. We conduct a field experiment in a large corporation to investigate effects of supportive leadership behaviors on worker satisfaction, engagement and performance. The CEO encourages all employees to participate in group discussions to provide input on a question of strategic importance during work hours. The employees with no personnel responsibility are randomly matched to employees with personnel responsibility (leader) to form groups of three or four members, all from different companies within the corporation to maximize the likelihood of them...
Across economies, flexibility of working hours responding to workers' needs is rare, whereas employers' expectations of availability for irregular hours remains common. Against this background, Goldin conjecture emerges, that difference in wages between men and women essentially reflects the difference in flexibility rather than only taste based discrimination. We propose a framed field online experiment with vignettes to test empirically the validity of a conjecture that gender wage gap is in fact merely an inflexibility penalty. We elicit wage premium/penalty due to working time flexibility, manipulating information about who initiated the change in working time arrangements.
We study prosocial behavior under moral suasion and monetary incentives. We employ an incentivized online experiment with (i) a real effort task (ii) a multiple price list task and (iii) a social norm elicitation task. Our results contribute to the understanding of how prosocial behavior respond to external interventions.
More evidence shows that public movement can promote voting turnout in the following election. This paper wishes to go further with these findings to answer how people’s experience of public participation affects their voting behavior. We develop a two-stage lab experiment to test what factors in public participation mainly change people’s voting behavior. In the first stage, subjects participate in threshold public good games in different settings including low threshold, communication and opinion leader. Then, in the second stage, every subject has to decide whether to vote. We can thus observe people’s voting behavior with various participation experiences. Our initial result shows that low threshold is easier to reach than the baseline and thus subjects in this treatment have more e...
We conduct a correspondence test in the market for shared housing to identify the magnitude of ethnic and gender discrimination and the role of personal information posted on a social media platform. About 4,900 fictitious applications with a randomly assigned Turkish-, or German-sounding female or male name will be sent to vacant room ads. In addition, we randomly add a link to a social media profile to determine the influence of such personal information on callback rates. We carefully constructed these fictional social media accounts on Instagram for over a year to make them as realistic as possible, conducting several surveys among young people to ensure that the profiles are close to reality with a sufficient number of followers. Unlike previous research, we can approximate whether...