AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12407 studies with locations in 171 countries.
Many actions in organizations do not directly benefit the individuals who take them, yet they create meaningful value for others or for the organization as a whole. Such behaviors are often described as discretionary behaviors. Despite their importance for learning and improvement, it remains unclear how organizations can encourage individuals to engage in them at scale. We examine this question in the setting of student course evaluations at a major French business school. Completing an evaluation is a voluntary contribution that can support teaching and program improvements. Yet, it offers limited immediate private benefits to the individual student. As a result, participation is often lower than institutions would like, even though evaluations are an important input into improvement ...
Collective decisions in the real world rarely occur in isolation but within systems where authority shapes norms, expectations, and outcomes. While extensive research has examined leadership in cooperative behavior, the distinct influence of authority, in particular how its legitimacy affects compliance remains underexplored. This gap is especially critical in environmental dilemmas where technical solutions require deeper understanding of human behavioral responses to different sources of power. This study investigates how different sources of authority influence rule compliance in a public bad game, and how the authorities themselves perceive the sources of power. In addition, we examine whether the mere presence of an Authority affects investment decisions by comparing behavior ...
Sub-Saharan Africa faces high youth unemployment, with women disproportionately excluded from labor market opportunities due to mobility and social constraints. At the same time, global freelancing platforms offer opportunities to earn wages that far exceed those available in local markets. Yet, informational and reputational frictions—such as limited knowledge of effective bidding strategies, weak initial profiles, and lack of job search persistence—as well as liquidity constraints prevent many skilled workers from successfully entering these markets. This study evaluates whether reducing these frictions improves labor market outcomes for young African professionals in remote work. We will conduct a randomized controlled trial with workers who meet baseline screening criteria. Parti...
This study examines how online dispute-resolution systems should be designed when a dispute can be reduced to a single compensation amount. Economic theory provides two natural benchmarks in this setting: direct bargaining and a structured one-shot ODR procedure based on the canonical sealed-bid mechanism. However, real platforms often add practical features such as bid revision after an impasse, algorithmic intervention when the parties’ requests are incompatible. These features are common in practice but are not well rationalized by standard bargaining theory, making their value an empirical question. In an online experiment, participants bargain over the division of 100 points while each has a private fallback amount if no agreement is reached. Participants are randomly assigned to B...
In many economically important environments, people receive information from sources whose interests are transparent. Such communication naturally invites skepticism because receivers understand that senders have incentives to influence their beliefs. However, skepticism should not be indiscriminate. When a sender communicates a message that contradicts the direction in which the sender benefits from influencing the receiver, the message becomes particularly credible because it is difficult to reconcile with purely opportunistic behavior. In this paper, we ask whether receivers exploit this credibility of such incentive-incongruent messages or whether they continue to rely primarily on their own judgment, even when sender incentives imply that a message is unusually likely to be true? ...
This study evaluates how survey mode and respondent selection protocols affect the accuracy of food security estimates. The experiment is embedded in a household survey implemented by the World Food Programme (WFP) in Colombia. Households are randomly assigned to one control group and three treatment groups: (1) a food diary benchmark group, (2) a face‑to‑face survey group, (3) a phone survey group without respondent selection protocol, and (4) a phone survey group with a respondent selection protocol designed to identify knowledgeable respondents involved in food‑related household decisions. The research addresses three questions: (1) whether phone surveys generate less accurate food security estimates compared to face‑to‑face surveys when benchmarked against food diaries; (2) wheth...
Differences in workplace outcomes can depend on factors beyond actual task performance. This project studies whether the way workers describe their own performance affects how others evaluate that performance. In an online experiment, participants are shown profiles of workers doing either a Raven-style logical reasoning test or a writing test and are asked to rate the workers on their test performance. Each profile contains either 1) the pieces of work with suggested solutions alongside self-evaluations of the worker describing their task performance on this task; or 2) the pieces of work with suggested solutions alongside some descriptive texts that match in length and positivity of language (control group), randomly shown to participants. I hypothesise that exposure to worker self-ev...
This study is a three-year follow up to an evaluation of low-cost behavioral interventions integrated into a productive inclusion program in Ghana. While prior research shows these interventions prompt immediate behavior change, a significant gap remains in understanding whether these effects persist over time and if they translate into improved livelihood outcomes. The original randomized control trial showed positive impact on saving behavior, but delays limited follow through on investments. This longer-term follow-up aims to measure if these interventions lead to enduring savings habits, reinforced financial self-efficacy, and ultimately, increased financial resilience, business performance, and overall well-being. Additionally, the follow-up will update the cost-effectiveness...
Recent work shows that worker responses to peer information are heterogeneous, depending on workers' information preferences and their relative earnings position from peers (Lim, 2025, 2026). I conduct a follow-up field experiment with the same sample of around 2,900 rideshare drivers to test whether targeting who receives peer information and which peer benchmark each worker observes can amplify the labor supply gains from peer-information disclosure in the workplace. Over a six-week intervention, drivers are randomly assigned to one of three information arms: no peer information, standard peer information based on a randomly drawn reference group, or targeted peer information whose reference group is drawn from lower earnings percentile ranks. The targeting rule is calibrated using es...
The project analyzes the role of information dissemination regarding new technologies and more efficient agricultural practices, and the potential bottlenecks extension services might face in their role of bridging the distance between the research institutions and the local farmers. We consider an ICRAF program targeting dairy producers in Uganda. The farmer trainer (FT) program focuses on dissemination of a set of practices to improve animal feeds and use them more efficiently. EADD trains volunteer farmer trainers, who in turn train other farmers in the production and use of the high-value animal feeds and feeding practices. This study is aimed at estimating the overall impact of EADD farmer Trainer approach, as well as analyzing the impact of different variations of the Farmer to ...