AEA RCT Registry currently lists 2314 studies with locations in 127 countries.
We experimentally examine the role of private information and communication in a public goods environment with uncertain returns. We consider a public goods game in which the Marginal Per Capita Return (MPCR) is either high or low. Before contributing, three players observe private signals correlated with the true MPCR and then send cheap talk messages to one another. There are social gains from truthful communication, but a private incentive to exaggerate. We compare treatments with and without cheap talk, finding that messages are largely truthful and influence contribution decisions. In further treatments, we increase the incentive to exaggerate and find reduced truthfulness and smaller gains from communication.
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Loss aversion is widely studied in the monetary domain as well as with respect to material goods. However, little is known about its relevance in the non-material domain. We plan to conduct a laboratory experiment to explore whether the concept of loss aversion applies to social image concerns, a non-material good. Social image concerns are important in an individual decision-making since people typically care about their reputation. We plan to analyze whether an exogenous improvement or harm to one's reputation follows the same pattern as gaining and losing money or material goods. Our experimental design attempts to quantify the effect of loss aversion in social image concerns via the scope of lying.
This study is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) on the effects of mentoring on SMEs in Norway. We aim to get a better understanding of firm development and dynamics in the presence of public interventions. Does mentoring affect firm performance and firm-survival? Does it matter what type of state aid a firm is granted; mentoring versus the financial equivalent of the service? The trial is a three-armed parallel randomized control trial. The first group will receive mentoring; the second group will receive the financial equivalent to the cost of the mentoring, and the third group is a control. The population consists of small and medium-sized enterprises who have applied for and been granted financial support from Innovation Norway. From this population, we draw the three groups. All ...
This project provides evidence on how cooperative inclination is related to professional behavior and success in a large multinational software corporation. We analyze data to be elicited through artefactual field experiments and company data to be linked on the individual and group level. Also, potential sources of naturally occurring experiments as well as potential field interventions are anticipated. The three main hypotheses we are going to address are the effect of cooperative inclination measured via variants of the public goods game on main outcome variables of professional behavior within a company (1), the predictive power of cooperative norms elicited through coordination mechanisms (2), and the external validity of these experimental measures of cooperation (3).
I create randomised variation in farm security by matching randomly selected Kenyan smallholding farmers with subsidized Maasai watchmen to protect farms during the main agricultural season. I explore the effect of theft and property crime by testing whether farmers engage in different types of production when their farms are more secure against theft. I further explore how social networks are used to substitute for imperfect protection of property in an environment where state institutions are unable to fully protect farms, and how theft is used to sanction those who neglect social obligations.
Reducing the consumption of animal products is an increasingly recognized public policy objective. With its health, environmental and ethical stakes, the transition to plant-based diets is now emerging as a major challenge for the public authorities. The means implemented to promote this transition have in recent years been mainly the work of associations towards consumers and producers, which is sometimes referred to as private politics. The work of raising awareness on these issues has mainly been led by two types of associations: associations adopting a reformist / welfarist discourse, ie, which aims to improve farming conditions and reduce meat consumption, and associations adopting an abolitionist discourse, ie, aimed at stopping the exploitation of animals and, thus, at the end of...
When faced with intertemporal trade-offs, many economic decision makers display a present bias, that is, their desire for immediate gratification leads them to become disproportionally more impatient when choices directly affect the present. Evidence for this comes, for example, from financial decision-making, exercising and effort provision, supporting the notion that intertemporal decision-making is often time-inconsistent. While the evidence for the existence of present bias is numerous, the question of how to interpret time-inconstistency in general and present bias in particular, from a welfare perspective remains open. In this project, we plan to shed light on this topic by investigating, through the means of a laboratory experiment, whether present bias should be treated as a tru...
Most governments of developed countries offer some form of tax benefits to encourage charitable giving. The efficacy of such policies eventually depends on whether donors are attentive towards these policies and what (mis)perception donors have. A rich tax literature has demonstrated that consumers are inattentive to value-added taxes when they are not salient and that individuals have misperceptions concerning complex tax incentives. There is little evidence whether salience and information provision of tax deductions might matter for donations. Furthermore, it is not clear whether the results from previous studies in the tax literature that test for salience and information provision would translate to charitable giving, since making extrinsic incentives more salient could potentiall...
We conducted a randomized controlled trial among 1,660 women from 80 villages in northeastern Nigeria. Respondents were randomly assigned to view one of the two flipcharts: 2) control flipcharts, which contained written explanation about the severity of the disease, or 1) `scared-straight' flipcharts that contain the salient information about the disease severity in addition to the written explanation about the severity of the disease. Additionally, respondents were provided randomly assigned amounts of cash incentives: 5 naira (3.3 US. cents), 300 naira (2 US. dollars), or 800 naira (5.3 US. dollars).