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Understanding cooperation to contain a pandemic. A behavioral economics analysis

Last registered on April 29, 2020

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Understanding cooperation to contain a pandemic. A behavioral economics analysis
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0005749
Initial registration date
April 28, 2020

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
April 29, 2020, 11:38 AM EDT

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

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
MIT

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
University of Nottingham

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2020-04-29
End date
2020-05-15
Secondary IDs
Abstract
Containing a pandemic, like the current Covid-19 pandemic, requires people not to interact physically with each other—that is, they have to stay at home and refrain from many social activities they normally like to undertake in the company of other people. This is a large-scale cooperation problem, where (some) people may have some incentives to break the rules for self-interested reasons but are thereby undermining the collective efficacy of containment strategies. Here, we are interested in the behavioral dimensions of people’s decisions to stay at home or not. There are several potentially relevant behavioral dimensions: People’s pro-social inclinations, their patience and risk preferences, their trust in the authorities, and their tendency to follow other people’s behavior may all play a part in decisions to stay at home or not. We therefore measure these preferences, using a mixture of tested survey tools (e.g., the Global Preference Survey and the Social Value Orientation test) and incentivized behavioral games (sequential prisoner’s dilemma, dictator game, and public goods game). We will also measure various motives to comply or not with the stay-at-home rules. We plan to run the study on Amazon Mechanical Turk in two waves of 600 participants each.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
ARECHAR, ANTONIO and SIMON GAECHTER. 2020. "Understanding cooperation to contain a pandemic. A behavioral economics analysis." AEA RCT Registry. April 29. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.5749-1.0
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
We invite 1,200 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) to take part in an incentivized survey programmed in Qualtrics (see document attached). The survey consists of three main sections.
In the first one we use three incentivized economic games to measure: i) cooperation using a one-shot public goods game; ii) conditional cooperation using a sequential prisoner’s dilemma game; iii) and altruism using an ad hoc donation task.
In the second section we present participants with hypothetical scenarios that also measure standard economic preferences, based on the Global Preference Survey (GPS) by Falk et al. 2018, and the Triple Dominance Measure of Social Value Orientation (SVO) by Van Lange et al. 1997.
In the third section we survey the participants’ opinions about the current epidemic, the behavior about other people, the severity of the current crisis, and build an index of compliance with social distancing rules as a proxy for cooperation.
We conclude the study with an exploratory section where we assess the participants’ prosocial motives based in their demographics.
Our intervention will be implemented in two stages: on April 30th we will recruit the first 600 participants and two weeks later, on May 14th, we will recruit the last 600 new participants. This approach will allow us to explore any temporal dynamics between those days, where the number of cases are likely to increase as the lockdown policies relax at the state level. This approach will also allow us to test the robustness of our findings while replicating the results from the first stage.
Intervention Start Date
2020-04-29
Intervention End Date
2020-05-15

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Overall cooperation / compliance across the three sections
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
This study does not have a treatment or a control, and therefore no between-subject design. Instead, it surveys cooperative outcomes from all participants through different angles, and almost all measures are therefore within-subjects. Design details can be found in the attached qualtrics survey (available upon request).
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Randomization done by the survey software qualtrics (to determine the order of some of the questions).
Randomization Unit
Individual question presented in the survey.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
1,200 MTurk participants.
Sample size: planned number of observations
1,200 MTurk participants.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
1,200 MTurk participants (600 different participants in each of the two waves).
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
The Nottingham School of Economics Research Ethics Committee
IRB Approval Date
2020-04-08
IRB Approval Number
N/A
IRB Name
MIT COUHES
IRB Approval Date
2018-06-13
IRB Approval Number
1806392996
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