Revelation of feedback: Evidence from a lab experiment.

The treatment conditions that we will implement are:
1) Presence or absence of the public versus private feedback
2) Presence or absence of extreme subjective judgment from others.
3) Presence or absence of strategic incentives to be chosen to be partnered with.
We test for the impact of these treatments by gender of the partcipants on their choice of more versus less informative feedback.

2019-11-19

2020-07-31

-Choice of more informative feedback versus less informative feedback
-Prior and posterior beliefs about one's own performance in a task. (that is, probability with which participants think that they are in the top 50% of the performance distribution)

1) Beliefs about one's partners ability in the task. (that is, probability that their partner is in the top 50% of the performance distribution)

First, at the outset of the experiment, participants will perform a task. Following the task, participants will be asked to report their prior belief about their relative performance. After that, they will be randomly matched in groups of two and be asked to choose between more informative and less informative feedback while varying the presence of strategic incentives, subjective judgement by others and revelation of one's feedback to others.

In summary, according to their experimental group, participants are asked to choose between either more informative or less informative feedback. We vary the costs and benefits for the more informative feedback to understand whether apart from preferences for more information, choice of feedback is affected by our proposed treatments. These costs and benefits are explained in the intervention section.

All participants perform a quiz task. After performance of the task, the participants are asked to state their beliefs about their performance in the task. Participants are also told that they will be incentivized according to how close they are to their actual performance. Each participant will be paired with one random other participant in the lab who will be referred to as their paired participant.

According to their experimental group, participants are then asked to choose between more informative versus less informative feedback and also state their posterior belief after receiving their feedback. Thus, from a monetary perspective (that is, because beliefs are incentivised) participants have an incentive to choose more informative feedback.

We will vary the features of the information environment to understand whether participants demand for information is affected by it in an environment where more precise information is incentivized (due to posterior beliefs). Before we move to detailed design, we lay out some definitions below:
Public versus private feedback
1) Private feedback: If participants opt for private feedback, then only they will be provided feedback about their performance in the task. The feedback will be in terms of whether they are in the top 50% of their distribution or not. This feedback will be provided with an error. In particular, if they are in the top 50% (bottom 50%) then they may be provided with the feedback that they are in the bottom 50% (top 50%). But there will be a higher chance that they receive correct feedback (60%) than incorrect feedback.
2) Public feedback: If participants opt for public feedback, then both them and their paired participant will get to see their feedback about their performance in the task. The feedback will be in terms of whether they are in the top 50% of their distribution or not. This feedback will be provided with an error. In particular, if they are in the top 50% (bottom 50%) be provided with the feedback that they are in the bottom 50% (top 50%). But there will be a higher chance that they receive correct feedback (90%) than incorrect feedback. Thus public feedback is more informative than private feedback.
The different treatments are:
1) Treatment 1 (private and public information): Participants get to choose between more informative feedback versus less informative feedback about their performance with the feature that choosing the more informative feedback will mean that their feedback is revealed to others as well. That is they get to choose between public and private feedback revelation.
2) Treatment 2 (subjective judgement): Participants get to choose between more informative feedback versus less informative feedback about their performance with the feature that choosing more informative feedback will mean that their feedback is shown to others and also comes with subjective judgment from others. This subjective judgement is designed to be extreme (extremely good or extremely bad).
3) Treatment 3 (strategic incentives): Participants get to choose between more informative feedback versus less informative feedback about their performance with the feature that choosing more informative feedback will mean that their feedback is revealed to others and others also get to decide whether they want to partner with them or not. Others have an incentive to only partner with high ability participants.
4) Control: Participants get to choose between more informative feedback versus less informative feedback about their performance

In particular, we are interested in understanding whether the effect of the treatments is affected by the gender of the participants.

Done by the computer software (oTree, Chen et al. 2016).

Individual.

No

0

700 participants

175 each in treatment 1, treatment 2, treatment 3 and control for a total of 700 participants.