AEA RCT Registry currently lists 8636 studies with locations in 167 countries.
Competitions, or competitive incentives, have been shown, and are used in various real-world settings, to induce higher productivity and output. At the same time, in settings where individuals are able to affect the productivity or output of others, competition can also lead to individuals sabotaging one another. There are two main reasons as to why individuals sabotage when engaged in a competition. First, competition ties one’s payoff (e.g., earnings) to relative performance. This introduces a monetary incentive to sabotage others as it allows one to increase their likelihood of achieving a better relative performance and hence, a higher payoff. Second, being engaged in a competition alters an individual’s psyche and puts them in a competitive state of mind. This might in turn increas...
Across low and middle-income countries (LMICs) there are “missing women”, meaning that there are fewer women alive today than there demographically should be (Sen, 1992). Substantial research attention has been paid to “missing” female babies and girls – that is female children that are never born (Nie, 2011) and girls that never reach adulthood due to systematic neglect (Garg & Morduch, 1998; Gupta, 2002; Oster, 2009, 2016). However, more recent research indicates that the largest number of “missing women” are of adult age and would live in sub-Saharan Africa (Anderson & Ray, 2010; Bongaarts & Guilmoto, 2015). Comparatively less research attention has been paid to excess female mortality in adulthood and to the question of why women die prematurely. Anderson & Ray (2010) show that the ...
Hallucination is a sensory experience in which a person can see, hear, smell, taste, or feel something that is not actually present in the environment. Visual and auditory hallucinations have drastic effects on cognitions and emotions which leaves long term residues on dementia patients and normal individuals functionality. There is evidence that hallucinations may lead to effect the semantic memory and emotional problem like distress and depression. The effect of visual and auditory hallucination can be extremely distressing for mostly dementia patients rather than healthy individuals. However, there is very little evidence that hallucination leads towards dementia and distress or depression. There is also very little empirical data available regarding the direct impact of visual and a...
We study reporting behavior when a fraction of subject decisions are observed by the experimenter. In a laboratory experiment, we utilize an adapted Fischbacher and Follmi-Heusi (2013) die-roll task to implement the intervention. We use this experiment to test equilibrium predictions of lying models that consider a social image cost.
Are publicly-funded immunization programs cost-effective? To answer this, we run a large-scale experiment in China to estimate the cost-effectiveness of influenza and pneumococcal vaccines on elderly patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD). Vaccinated patients – relative to the control group – experienced improvements in their COPD condition, which led to a substantial decrease in their medical expenditure (public medical insurance reimbursements and out-of-pocket expenses). Conservative difference-in-differences estimates imply that every dollar spent making vaccination freely available reduced public medical insurance reimbursements by at least 10 to 25 dollars, and reduced total medical expenditure by 16 to 33 dollars. Comparing across beneficiaries, we find that ...
In Chile, significant challenges are faced in the mental health and well-being of children. One in every five children has a mental health disorder, and 70% have experienced violence at home. Additionally, the country leads in marijuana and cocaine use among youth in Latin America. To address these issues, we propose a scalable socio-emotional intervention that aims to improve the socio-emotional well-being of children in vulnerable contexts. The intervention design involves to enhance socio-emotional skills, to align them with children's tastes and preferences through the creation of cultural, sports, and scientific communities. This study aims to measure the causal effect on socio-emotional skills and psychosocial problems of children aged 9-10 years old. The evaluation will test if t...
This paper examines the influence of age-related media coverage of political figures on entrepreneurship among older adults, particularly in the context of the 2024 US Presidential Election. Utilizing a novel approach that bridges entrepreneurship, politics, and identity theories, we propose and test two mechanisms through which the salience of age affects older adults' entrepreneurial activities: performance effects and evaluative bias. Through a pair of pre-registered online priming experiments, we aim to demonstrate that media coverage highlighting the advanced age and cognitive decline of political candidates—specifically Joe Biden and Donald Trump—negatively impacts older adults' performance in entrepreneurial tasks and biases external evaluations of ventures led by older entrepren...
Generative AI economic benefits in aggregate are often cited. However, the productivity or efficiency improvements within organisations is an emerging topic. Recent research focused on knowledge work suggest productivity or efficiency improvements may be large, finding significant effects for certain types of tasks, with more benefits to less experienced workers. Evaluating the value/benefits and costs of GenAI in knowledge-driven organisations within a public sector may not be as clear-cut in a for-profit context. To provide some evidence, our study will test the impact of GenAI on two knowledge-work tasks among staff in the organisation.
A recent study by Loewenfeld and Zheng (2023) documented that individuals are correlation-sensitive and exhibit behavior patterns compatible with decreasing sensitivity to payoff differences (DSPD). These behavioral regularities can be explained by two competing theories: correlation-sensitive preferences, as characterized by Lanzani (2022), with concavity, or probability dominance, as advocated by Diecidue et al. (2020). In this study, we conduct a controlled lab experiment with students to examine the mechanisms underlying correlation sensitivity in decision making.
This study addresses how unethical behavior in scientific research impacts trust in science, contributing to a literature on the consequences of corruption and unethical behavior. We propose an informational delivery experiment with high school students in Brazil, where we present them with a summary of a suspected fraud scandal in behavioral science. We divide treated subjects into a "fraud" arm, where they only learn about the fraud accusations, and an "accountability'' arm, where they learn about the investigation and punishment processes involved; this allows us to tell apart the effects of learning about cheating from catching cheaters. We measure the effect on beliefs in science, the use of scientific evidence to update world views, real life attitudes towards science, and spillov...