AEA RCT Registry currently lists 1706 studies with locations in 117 countries.
A randomized controlled trial analyzing perspective-taking on processing information concerning verbal abuse was conducted with factory managers in 16 Bangladesh factories. Managers’ modal perception of the prevalence of verbal abuse was inconsistent with worker reports, indicating managers’ resistance to acknowledging verbal abuse. Perspective-taking improved information processing but the response was heterogeneous. Acknowledgement of the prevalence of verbal abuse increased only in those managers for whom there was consonance between personal beliefs and the data. Among managers who engaged with the exercise or viewed verbal abuse as inappropriate, treatment increased interest in and willingness to make changes based on the data.
Recent work posits that poverty lowers cognitive function (Mani et al. 2013), but evidence for behaviors in the field is lacking. If true, this has the potential to lower labor productivity among the poor, providing a channel through which poverty could directly reinforce itself. We design an experiment with piece rate manufacturing workers to examine a link between financial constraints and worker productivity. We induce variation in both the extent of financial constraints as well as their salience among workers.
This project has two main goals: (i) to create and validate an instrument capable of measuring the subjective beliefs and expectations that teachers have about the non-cognitive development of their students; (ii) through a random trial create an intervention that informs a group of teachers about the importance of socioemotional skills in the development and future academic and professional success of students. In this way, we intend to evaluate if we are able to change the pedagogical practices adopted in classroom, the appreciation that teachers give to non-cognitive abilities and also, if these potential changes are reflected in beneficial cognitive and non-cognitive results in students of treated teachers. The data for this evaluation comes from another experiment: "Assessing the I...
Reciprocation of gifts is well understood in economics and gift-giving is popular in business relationships. However, it is not yet clear whether and how conditional and unconditional business gifts differ in their ability to elicit positive reciprocity. We narrow this gap and conduct a controlled field experiment in collaboration with a local start-up company to study the power of different kinds of small business gifts to acquire new customers. More precisely, in a 2x2 experimental design, we compare the effectiveness of conditional and unconditional gifts, as well as of gifts of money and gifts in kind for customer acquisition. We expect that unconditional gifts are more powerful than conditional gifts in eliciting positive reciprocity. That is, we hypothesize that the success of a c...
A vast literature in economics has considered the question of how firms set prices, and a growing literature has demonstrated how real people differ systematically from theoretical consumers. In this project, we ask how real consumers in an experimental setting respond to firms' prices. We focus on a specific pricing strategy, bundling of multiple goods, which has been shown to be theoretically optimal in a wide variety of settings (Chu et al., 2011; Eckalbar, 2010) but that may result in long, complex menus of prices that are difficult for consumers to digest. We aim to study (1) whether these complex menus drive consumers to make sub-optimal choices, and (2) how those real choices might change optimal firm behavior. We also test the impacts of two firm strategies that affect the compl...
I conduct a field experiment on MovieLens to examine how various factors mediate peer effects.
The study seeks to analyse the impact cash transfers and of social psychological interventions (individually and in combination) on psychological and economic outcomes. Several sub-studies are associated with it.
What do people consider a fair distribution of educational resources between high and low ability children? To what extent do people let efficiency considerations and motivation levels matter when making this trade-off? I study this experimentally, using a novel design implemented on a representative sample of 2000 Americans. The participants distribute one-to-one tutoring between students who learn quickly and students who take more time and learn slower. To study underlying mechanisms, I use a between-design and include treatments where I vary the relative price of tutoring for the two groups of learners, as well as the relative motivation level between the learners.
This field trial explores the potential impact of introducing a pie-chart with relative spending across the major categories of public goods and services at the beginning of the tax reporting process. This experiment is run on the universe of taxpayers who file their taxes online in Belgium. Randomization happens by way of the last two digits of the national identity number. The treatment group is divided into four sub-groups that test for the additional impact of introducing a social norm message, a loss-aversion frame to the provision of public goods and tax compliance, and making penalties for non-compliance explicit. To measure compliance we consider reported taxable income and itemized tax deductions. Taxpayers are also invited to respond to a survey at the end of the tax reporting...
Social media has increasingly become an important source of news consumption, however, limited evidence exists on its causal effect. I will conduct a natural field experiment to measure the effects of news consumption on political opinions and political behavior. The main outcomes are whether participants are persuaded by news they were randomly exposed to as a result of the intervention and whether being offered content which matches the participant’s ideology increases polarization. The results will be used to compare models explaining how individuals learn when consuming news from an outlet with an ideological slant. Specifically, I will test if consumers are affected by the slant of an outlet and whether consumers suffer from confirmation bias and are persuaded only by news matching...