Experimental Design Details
The experiment will be conducted at the Pittsburgh Experimental Economic Laboratory. Subjects will participate in one session of an hour that consists of two parts.
In the first part of the experiment, participants perform the counting zero task of Abeler et al. (2011), where they see a 15x10 table filled with 0 or 1, and they have to count how many 0 are; after they submit an answer, a new table appears. Participants will work on this task for 25 minutes. Participants are paid according to a piece rate, where there are two possible piece rates with 50% each. In the high piece rate, participants get 50 cents for each table counted correctly, and in the low piece rate, they get 50 cents for 3 correctly counted tables. At the moment of performing the task, participants do not know which piece rate they have. While they are performing the task, they do not know if their answer is correct or incorrect.
Before starting the task, participants are told the payment earn in this part is provisional and the payment from the experiment will depend on the decisions made by them or others from the second part. They answer comprehension questions to make sure they know this.
In the second part, the participants are paired and have to decide how to distribute the sum of his and his partner's earnings between each other. Both participants of the pair will be making this decision, and one of them will be implemented. There are two treatments, full information, and partial information.
For the full information treatment, when making their decisions, participants will know the piece rate, the number of correctly counted tables, and the earnings of him and his partner.
In the partial information treatment, participants will not know the piece rate each of them got and neither the number of correctly counted tables. They will only know the earnings of each of them. In this treatment, before making the distribution decision, participants will be asked their beliefs about the piece rate he got and the piece rate his partner got. The beliefs are incentivized using the binarized scoring rule and following the recommendations of Danz et al. (2022). Participants will be provided with a histogram distribution of corrected counted tables from the first 3 sessions of the full information treatment, run on April 21, 2023. The elicit beliefs will be compared with the Bayesian belief generated by this distribution.
For both treatments, participants will be making distributive decisions (and belief elicitations, in the partial information treatment) for 11 different scenarios. 10 of these scenarios are hypothetical and one is the real one that corresponds to the information of the partner. The participants do not know which scenario is the real one, in the survey at the end of the experiment, they are asked which scenario they thought is the real one. The 10 hypothetical situations are the same for every participant in any treatment, where 5 of the hypothetical situations correspond to partners that got the high piece rate, and the other 5 to the low piece rate. The effort level was chosen such that most of the participants had to make decisions for earnings and effort levels above and below their own, and at the same time they have to be attainable effort levels. To determine the effort for the hypothetical situations, the data from Zimmermann (2020) and Abeler et al. (2011) was used.
Finally, the experiment finishes with a demographic survey.
The first 3 sessions of the full information treatment were conducted on April 21. The partial information treatment and one more session for the full information treatment will be conducted from April 27 to April 31.
References:
Abeler, Johannes, Armin Falk, Lorenz Goette, and David Huffman. 2011. "Reference Points and Effort Provision." American Economic Review, 101 (2): 470-92.
Danz, David, Lise Vesterlund, and Alistair J. Wilson. 2022. "Belief Elicitation and Behavioral Incentive Compatibility." American Economic Review, 112 (9): 2851-83.
Zimmermann, Florian. 2020. "The Dynamics of Motivated Beliefs." American Economic Review, 110 (2): 337-61.