Home Sweet Memories

Last registered on October 06, 2025

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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Home Sweet Memories

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0016797

Initial registration date

October 03, 2025

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

October 06, 2025, 3:11 PM EDT

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

Locations

Country

United States of America

Region

Primary Investigator

Name

Jason Bao

Affiliation

Claremont McKenna College

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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Peter Kelly

PI Affiliation

Claremont McKenna College

Contact Investigator

PI Name

Sharda Umanath

PI Affiliation

Claremont McKenna College

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

In development

Start date

2025-10-04

End date

2025-11-01

Keywords

Behavior, Finance & Microfinance

Additional Keywords

behavioral finance, real estate, memory

JEL code(s)

G4, G5 R3

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.

Abstract

We want to better understand how homeowners arrive at valuations for their homes. We hypothesize that their lived experiences in the home and the memories they take away from those experiences affect their happiness. Specifically, we hypothesize that home valuations are directly proportional to qualities and characteristics of the memories they associate with the house. We also hypothesize that there may be differences across gender given the existing evidence that women perform worse in real estate transactions than men. To test this against the null hypothesis that memories have no impact, we will run a survey experiment that asks respondents to answer questions related to home valuations/their memories.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Bao, Jason, Peter Kelly and Sharda Umanath. 2025. "Home Sweet Memories." AEA RCT Registry. October 06. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.16797-1.0

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

Intervention (Hidden)

Intervention Start Date

2025-10-04

Intervention End Date

2025-11-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

The proposed work have interesting implications for both economics and psychological science research on memory.

For economics, it would help researchers better understand the housing market. To our knowledge, it would also be the first study to show that personal memories can distort financial activity of large-value items. In forthcoming work, Jiang et al. (2025) show the importance of memory for personal trading decisions. However, their work relates more to the formation of stock market expectations. We would be building on their work by highlighting the value of memories separate from expectation formation. Ideally, we can then expand the study to include analysis of real-world housing transaction data.

Regarding psychological science, recent work indicates that people want more money for their everyday objects or mementos when the memory attached to the object was more central to the story of their life and greater served helpful everyday memory functions (Cate et al., in prep). The present work would provide corroborating evidence at a very different scale indicating that our personal memories can be associated with monetary value and that their monetary value might stem from the characteristics of the memories.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

In the experiment, participants will be randomized into one of the two following conditions. In the first treatment (priming) condition, they will be prompted to recall a memory from their home that is meaningful to them. Then, they will provide what they think their home is worth. In the second (control) condition, they will be asked to recall this memory after valuing their home. After asking subjects to recall a memory, we will ask them to make some self-ratings about the characteristics and quality of the memory. These questions will be draw from Autobiographical memory questionnaire (Rubin et al., 2019). Additionally, we will qualitatively code these memories to extract additional information.

Experimental Design Details

Randomization Method

Randomization done by Qualtrics, the computerized survey software we built out survey experiment on

Randomization Unit

The subjects will be randomly assigned into two groups

Was the treatment clustered?

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

NA, not clustered data

Sample size: planned number of observations

400

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

~200

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

We expect 5% increase in home valuation in the memory-first priming condition compared to the valuation-first control condition. This is about a Cohen's d of 0.22, and a small effect size

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB