What Do people Choose to Watch?

Last registered on September 28, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
What Do people Choose to Watch?
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0011330
Initial registration date
April 25, 2023

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
May 12, 2023, 5:14 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
September 28, 2023, 4:24 AM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
Cornell University

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2023-04-27
End date
2023-08-31
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
The goal of this project is to evaluate the impact of institutions promoting diversity in a controlled environment. The motivation for the study stems from concerns about diversity in academia, and specifically gender diversity, that appears particularly difficult to achieve. We want to explore whether institutions promoting gender diversity may or may not promote diversity of ideas in a world where there are gender differences in taste and expertise for certain fields, leading to some fields being more appealing to men and others to women.
If there is an incentive to hire women, preference may be given to women, but possibly mostly those in male fields. As a consequence, institutions promoting gender diversity may achieve more gender diversity but not necessarily more diversity of ideas. We propose a novel experimental design to study what ideas people choose to get exposed to and that will help us evaluate how institutions that promote gender diversity or diversity of fields may affect gender and idea diversity.
Specifically, we propose an experimental set up in which an individual, which we call “employer”, has to choose one presentation to watch from a set of presentations. This presentation can be either presented by a man or a woman and can either be in a female or a male field. We provide an incentive to choose a presentation of better quality, and also provide incentives to pay attention to the presentation itself.
The goal is to mimic hiring decisions in professional contexts, and academia in particular, where hiring someone has implications for exposure to their ideas.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Belot, Michele. 2023. "What Do people Choose to Watch?." AEA RCT Registry. September 28. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.11330-2.2
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
See pre-analysis plan for description.
Note: The study will include two stages: A pre-experimental stage (Stage 1) where we will collect data that we will use in the main experiment, and the main experiment (Stage 2). The first stage will be launched on April 27th 2023. The main experiment (Stage 2) will be launched in July 2023.
The first pre-registration of the analysis plan has been done on April 25th 2023, before launching Stage 1. At that date, the pre-analysis plan for the second stage was not finalized yet. We will therefore update the pre-analysis plan before launching Stage 2. Note that the analysis does not depend in any way on the outcome of Stage 1.
Intervention Start Date
2023-07-01
Intervention End Date
2023-07-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
(1) Share of female presenters chosen (SF-Presenter) = Number of female presenters chosen (NF-Presenter)/ Total number of presenters chosen
(2) Share of presentations in female fields (SF-Field) = Number of presentations in female fields chosen (NF-Field) / Total number of presenters chosen
(3) Share of women in female fields (SFF) = Number of chosen presentations by female presenters in female fields (NFF) / Total number of presenters chosen
(4) Share of women in male fields (SFM) = Number of chosen presentations by female presenters in male fields (NFM)/ Total number of presenters chosen
(5) Diversity of Ideas
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
See above

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
(1) Share of female presenters ranked first, second or third (SF-Presenter) = Number of female presenters ranked first, second or third (NF-Presenter)/ Total number of presenters ranked first, second or third
(2) Share of presentations in female fields ranked first, second or third (SF-Field) = Number of presentations in female fields ranked first, second or third (NF-Field) / Total number of presenters ranked first, second or third
(3) Share of women in female fields ranked first, second or third (SFF) = Number of presentations by female presenters in female fields ranked first, second or third (NFF) / Total number of presenters ranked first, second or third
(4) Share of women in male fields ranked first, second or third (SFM) = Number of presentations by female presenters in male fields ranked first, second or third (NFM)/ Total number of presenters ranked first, second or third
(5) Diversity of Ideas
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
See above

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
See attached document for details. Participants in the second stage of the experiment will be assigned at random (using Qualtrics random assignment mechanism) in one of 6 treatments in a 3 x 2 design.

Experimental variation 1: The questions asked to participants will either be “non-expertise attention questions” (that require no expertise in the topic) or “expertise attention questions” (that are easier to answer if one has some expertise in the topic). Both type of questions are single choice questions and have been designed by the research team. The non-expertise questions are of the format “what this sentence said?” giving a choice of four possible sentences, one of them taken from the script. The “expertise questions” relate to the substance of the talk. They are presumably easier to answer if one has some expertise or knowledge on the topic.

Experimental variation 2: An additional incentive will be given to select either a woman (Gender Incentive Treatment) or a presentation from a female field (“Health” or “Environment”) (Field Incentive Treatment) in comparison to a treatment with no preferential incentive (Baseline Treatment) .
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Automated randomization by Qualtrics
Randomization Unit
individual
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
no clusters
Sample size: planned number of observations
504 prolific participants
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
no clusters
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
See document attached.
Supporting Documents and Materials

Documents

Document Name
Amendment to PAP
Document Type
other
Document Description
This document describes why we would like to collect a small number (50) additional observations.
File
Amendment to PAP

MD5:

SHA1:

Uploaded At: September 28, 2023

IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Institutional Review Board for Human Participants Cornell University
IRB Approval Date
2023-03-17
IRB Approval Number
IRB0147269
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials