AEA RCT Registry currently lists 4155 studies with locations in 153 countries.
The goal of this study is to validate a new method for eliciting individual time preferences presented in an earlier study (AEARCTR-0005115). In theory, the method we proposed (“Multiple Lottery Lists”) is robust to variation in background consumption that may arise over time, while other methods are not. In this study, we will test whether the estimated time preferences parameters correlate with behaviors that are inter-temporal in nature such as saving and health-related behaviors, and with personality characteristics. To do this, we will collect additional data on the same samples as in the first study.
We use four canonical behavioral predictions and test their sensitivity experimenter demand effects, using standard student subject pool of an experimental lab . Specifically we look at probability weighting, present bias, endowment effect and charitable giving and examine if demand effects can reverse the standard comparative static found in the literature.
Public procurement plays a key role in allocating limited budgetary resources to public service delivery in countries with a functional rule of law. This project studies a puzzling phenomenon: in developing countries like Brazil, substantive shares of the federal and sub-national budgets are not spent despite clear needs for additional resources to improve the quality of public services or to fund emergency spending in contexts of crisis. In line with a growing literature that documents the potential unintended effects of the enforcement of rules on bureaucratic performance, we investigate the role of procurement risk - when passive waste is misinterpreted as active waste – as a driver of unspent public funds by Brazilian municipal governments. Randomizing interventions that decrease pr...
The aim of this project is to evaluate the use of nudges to improve households’ food choices towards healthier options in a real shopping framework. Data for the analysis come from a big supermarket that keeps track of purchases made by clients who are members of its loyalty program. We hypothesize that customers will improve the nutritious quality of food choices when provided with weekly messages reminding them about the importance of eating healthy food, suggesting simple ways to include them in the family’s menu, and encouraging them to take these tips into action. In particular, messages designed to highlight and promote the consumption of fruits, vegetables, grains, seeds, nuts, legumes and fish, and cooking at home, are expected to have an impact on the composition of grocery pur...
This study measures the effects of different forms of instructor communication in an online/hybrid class setting at a large, public university. Study participants randomly receive different forms of communications from their instructors. We hypothesize that various forms of communication in this setting has the potential to affect course grades, the frequency of help-seeking, and overall perceptions of instructor quality.
We investigate the impact of competition on the susceptibility to moral transgressions. We use contests to model competition and consider lying as a prominent form of moral transgression. Contests are likely to influence the frequency of moral transgressions for two reasons: First, the expected monetary benefit from lying may differ between settings with and without competition. Second, contests may reduce moral concerns by triggering a “desire to win”. We design treatments where the expected financial benefit from lying is the same in treatments with and without a contest structure. This allows us to isolate the pure behavioral impact of competing against others. Overall, our study consists of four treatments. We design three treatments with identical financial benefits from lying. In ...
MDRC, in partnership with MEF Associates and Abt Associates, is conducting an evaluation of Central City Concern (CCC), as part of broader study called Building Evidence on Employment Strategies (BEES). BEES is funded by Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation within the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. CCC is an organization in Portland, Oregon that primarily serves adults with substance abuse disorders and provides treatment, health care, housing services, and employment services. The evaluation will be focused on two specific housing programs that CCC operates for those exiting a CCC-operated detox center. Each program offers a suite of recovery, housing, and employment services. The evaluation is using a randomized co...
Training and professionalization interventions are an important vehicle for economic support within the development assistance landscape. Yet rigorous quantitative impact evaluations of such programs remain scarce, especially in developing countries. In order to help fill this research gap, we will conduct a rigorous impact evaluation of a program for the Professionalization of Artisans (ProfArts) in Ghana. The program will deliver top-up training, licensing, certification, and related benefits to up to 10,000 artisans drawn from the Ghanaian construction sector, with beneficiaries to be randomly selected from up to 20,000 baseline respondents. In a first step, we examine the effects of randomly assigned recruitment content on application rates, the composition of the applicant pool, an...
It is well-established that round numbers play an important role in bargaining situations. In a first step, using data from Backus, Blake and Tadelis (2019) we show that a large fraction of successful negotiations end with a round price, and that round final prices are associated with quicker agreement. These effects might be driven by a simple preference for round numbers or by round numbers serving as focal points. In a second step, we design a theory-guided experiment to disentangle these explanations. To this end, we plan to run two treatments on Amazon MTurk with roughly 1000 participants. In treatment One, a single decision-maker might be affected by round-number bias. Treatment Two extends the setting in a one-change-at-a-time fashion to two-player bargaining where additionally r...
The setting in which willingness to compete is commonly studied in the lab differs from real- life competitive settings along two important dimensions (Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007),(Buser, Niederle, and Oosterbeek, 2014), (Almås, Cappelen, Salvanes, Sørensen, and Tungodden, 2016). 1. Competing in real life creates losers 2. Competing in real life either means competing against a selective group of people who also want to compete (selection) or forcing others into competition (forcing). We want to investigate whether these dimensions matter to people when deciding whether to compete and whether these dimensions have an impact on the gender difference in tournament entry that is robustly found in the classical setting. This leads to the following research questions: 1. Are people more ...