AEA RCT Registry currently lists 8574 studies with locations in 167 countries.
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. ...
This study is about understanding mechanisms underlying the long-term effects of culture.
We examine whether and how professional investors use human capital information in their investment decisions. Human capital has become a vital component of firms’ operations, with annual expenses related to employees as a share of revenue increasing by more than 50% since 1990, compared to no growth for physical capital expenditures. Despite the increasing financial materiality of human capital investments, U.S. firms are required to disclose only two metrics related to non-executive employees, the total number of employees and the median wage. As a result, investors have demanded more information from firms and regulators. We will conduct an experiment among professional investors to determine whether and how details about a firm’s human capital management impact their valuations of t...