AEA RCT Registry currently lists 8576 studies with locations in 167 countries.
If employers hold biased beliefs about a particular group, they may be less likely to hire workers from this group, preventing them from learning and correcting their beliefs. This paper explores whether temporary affirmative action can correct biased beliefs and in turn improve representation even after the policy is lifted. I elicit employer hiring decisions and beliefs about potential employee performance in two between-subject experimental treatments: a control treatment without affirmative action and a temporary affirmative action treatment.
This project examines a government form that is used to apply for an income support payment. BETA has conducted user testing and reviewed existing literature in order to draft updates to the form. This survey experiment will evaluate how the updates to the form influence the allocation of the payment. We will compare the existing form with two ‘active choice’ treatment conditions. The efficacy of the updated forms will be judged by how much of the payment participants allocate to one member of a (fictional) couple. BETA’s survey experiment will sit in a broader survey being run by a university for a government agency. Findings from this research will be shared with relevant government agencies to guide future updates to the form. Findings will also be published on the BETA website.
The choice of whether to screen is important and prevalent in many situations, such as hiring workers or purchasing insurance. It is also implicit in many policy choices. If a policy encourages uniform behavior, different types of people behave similarly, making it impossible to infer the person's type from their behavior. Choosing whether to screen can be difficult because it requires trading off immediate costs with delayed benefits. We propose that individuals may screen too little because they fail to consider the effects of inference. To test this hypothesis, we conduct an online experiment that simulates a hiring scenario with an initial trial task. Participants make two decisions: selecting a trial task and then choosing which candidate to hire. We hypothesize that the majority o...
In this project we test whether messages that (a) show that many people have taken an action, (b) make a person feel important to reaching a goal, and (c) the combination of the two can cause people to take an action. We use a series of three field experiments with over thirty-four-thousand subjects. Two of these field experiments randomize messages sent in the charitable giving setting to see the effects of being made to feel important and the popularity of an action on donation rates. The final field experiment looks at the effects of these same types of messages on voter turnout rates in a university election.
The proposed study investigates how technology-assisted behavioral interventions can help individuals improve their sleep habits in order to improve educational outcomes and health.
There is evidence that women who own and operate small and medium enterprises receive relatively less bank financing in many emerging markets, including Vietnam. In this study we consider and test the impact of bonus incentives to a bank's lending agents for lending to women owned and operated small and medium enterprises (WSMEs).
Modern social communication systems–ranging from email to social media systems–present a dizzying number of decisions for users. Privacy configurations, when not hidden by social media companies, are opaque. Individuals sometimes are also not aware of the externality that their sharing decisions can have to others. Thus, it is often hard for individuals to react or behave in ways that model the personal behaviors or are communally advantageous. Personalized recommendations, interfaces, interventions or nudges can help but implementing these requires an understanding end-user preferences. Our research seeks to tackle this challenge by modeling individual preferences through the use of economic games, both in a neutral context and in specific scenarios. Simultaneously, we will collect use...
This study examines the effects of neglecting correlation in choice under risk. While alternative theories of choice under risk, such as regret aversion theory (Loomes and Sudgen, 1987) and salience theory (Bordalo, Gennaioli and Shleifer, 2012) suggest agents attend to the underlying correlation and derive utility from state contingencies, it remains an open question how people process these decisions. The repercussions of correlation neglect have paramount implications for the modern portfolio theory for risk-averse agents who seek to minimize variance for a given expected return (Markowitz, 1952). Relatedly, it may lead to missed hedging or arbitrage opportunities (Eyster and Weizsacker, 2016). How people process correlated risky choice in the evaluation of trade-offs between differe...
Wage transparency in the workplace matters to employers and employees alike. Some countries such as Norway have introduced wage transparency by allowing constituents to search for wage levels through an online search. Employees have several interests that are related to wage transparency, such as knowing that they are receiving a fair wage relative to their coworkers or knowing their relative position in a social or professional ladder. Managers are aware that their employees value this information as a way to “understand and contextualize their workplace,” yet face trade-offs (Collins & Mossholder, 2014). In the interest of encouraging productive employees, increasing or maintaining job satisfaction, increasing trust, and reducing employee turnover, employers and policymakers face the ...
Classroom features affect the learning process in schools. Temperature levels inside classrooms, an important classroom feature, have been shown to affect learning outcomes. In this context, we are interested in looking at low cost solutions aimed at reducing ambient temperatures in schools and anganwadis (a government run system of child care in rural India). Through our collaboration with the Energy Management Centre (EMC) of the state of Kerala we will be using roof paint with a high Solar Reflective index(SRI) to cool the roofs in government schools and anganwadis using a randomised controlled design. The study will look at the impact of cool roofs on indoor temperature, thermal comfort and also on attendance, cognitive effort and learning outcomes of school and anganwadi students. ...