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Steffen Andersen, Erwin Bulte, Uri Gneezy, John A List

Cited by*: 16 Downloads*: 27

No abstract available

Uri Gneezy, John A List, George Wu

Cited by*: 52 Downloads*: 40

Expected utility theory, prospect theory, and most other models of risky choice are based on the fundamental premise that individuals choose among risky prospects by balancing the value of the possible consequences. These models, therefore, require that the value of a risky prospect lie between the value of that prospect's highest and lowest outcome. Although this requirement seems essential for any theory of risky decision-making, we document a violation of this condition in which individuals value a risky prospect less than its worst possible realization. This demonstration, which we term the uncertainty effect, draws from more than 1000 experimental participants, and includes hypothetical and real pricing and choice tasks, as well as field experiments in real markets with financial incentives. Our results suggest that there are choice situations in which decision-makers discount lotteries for uncertainty in a manner that cannot be accommodated by standard models of risky choice.

Uri Gneezy, Moshe Hoffman, John A List

Cited by*: 8 Downloads*: 22

Women remain significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology workforce. Some have argued that spatial ability differences, which represent the most persistent gender differences in the cognitive literature, are partly responsible for this gap. The underlying forces at work shaping the observed spatial ability differences revolve naturally around the relative roles of nature and nurture. Although these forces remain among the most hotly debated in all of the sciences, the evidence for nurture is tenuous, because it is difficult to compare gender differences among biologically similar groups with distinct nurture. In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society. We also show that about one-third of the effect can be explained by differences in education. Given that none of our participants have experience with puzzle solving and that villagers from both societies have the same means of subsistence and shared genetic background, we argue that these results show the role of nurture in the gender gap in cognitive abilities.

Steven D Levitt, John A List, Susanne Neckermann, Sally Sadoff

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 161

Research on behavioral economics has established the importance of factors such as reference dependent preferences, hyperbolic preferences, and the value placed on non-financial rewards. To date, these insights have had little impact on the way the educational system operates. Through a series of field experiments involving thousands of primary and secondary school students, we demonstrate the power of behavioral economics to influence educational performance. Several insights emerge. First, we find that incentives framed as losses have more robust effects than comparable incentives framed as gains. Second, we find that non-financial incentives are considerably more cost-effective than financial incentives for younger students, but were not effective with older students. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consistent with hyperbolic discounting, all motivating power of the incentives vanishes when rewards are handed out with a delay. Since the rewards to educational investment virtually always come with a delay, our results suggest that the current set of incentives may lead to under-investment. For policymakers, our findings imply that in the absence of immediate incentives, many students put forth low effort on standardized tests, which may create biases in measures of student ability, teacher value added, school quality, and achievement gaps.

Fuhai Hong, Tanjim Hossain, John A List, Migiwa Tanaka

Cited by*: 6 Downloads*: 98

A well-recognized problem in the multitasking literature is that workers might substantially reduce their effort on tasks that produce unobservable outputs as they seek the salient rewards to observable outputs. Since the theory related to multitasking is decades ahead of the empirical evidence, the economic costs of standard incentive schemes under multitasking contexts remain largely unknown. This study provides empirical insights quantifying such effects using a field experiment in Chinese factories. Using more than 2200 data points across 126 workers, we find sharp evidence that workers do trade off the incented output (quantity) at the expense of the non-incented one (quality) as a result of a piece rate bonus scheme. Consistent with our theoretical model, treatment effects are much stronger for workers whose base salary structure is a flat wage compared to those under a piece rate base salary. While the incentives result in a large increase in quantity and a sharp decrease in quality for workers under a flat base salary, they result only in a small increase in quantity without affecting quality for workers under a piece rate base salary.

Omar Al-Ubaydli, Steffen Andersen, Uri Gneezy, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 2

Constructing compensation schemes for effort in multi-dimensional tasks is complex, particularly when some dimensions are not easily observable. When incentive schemes contractually reward workers for easily observed measures, such as quantity produced, the standard model predicts that unrewarded dimensions, such as quality, will be neglected. Yet, there remains mixed empirical evidence in favor of this standard principal-agent model prediction. This paper reconciles the literature by using both theory and empirical evidence. The theory outlines conditions under which principals can use a piece rate scheme to induce higher quantity and quality levels than analogous fixed wage schemes. Making use of a series of complementary laboratory and field experiments we show that this effect occurs because the agent is uncertain about the principal's monitoring ability and the principal's choice of a piece rate signals to the agent that she is efficient at monitoring.

Jonathan E Alevy, Craig E Landry, John A List

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 46

A pillar of behavioral research is that preferences are constructed during the process of choice. A prominent finding is that uninformative numerical "anchors" influence judgment and valuation. It remains unclear whether such processes influence market equilibria. We conduct two experiments that extend the study of anchoring to field settings. The first experiment produces evidence that some consumers' valuations can be anchored in novel situations; there is no evidence that experienced agents are influenced by anchors. The second experiment finds that anchors have only transient effects on market outcomes that converge to equilibrium predictions after a few market periods.

Uri Gneezy, Kenneth Leonard, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

This study uses a controlled experiment to explore whether there are gender differences in selecting into competitive environments across two distinct societies: the Maasai in Tanzania and the Khasi in India. One unique aspect of these societies is that the Maasai represent a textbook example of a patriarchal society whereas the Khasi are matrilineal. Similar to the extant evidence drawn from experiments executed in Western cultures, Maasai men opt to compete at roughly twice the rate as Maasai women. Interestingly, this result is reversed amongst the Khasi, where women choose the competitive environment more often than Khasi men, and even choose to compete weakly more often than Maasai men. We view these results as potentially providing insights into the underpinnings of the factors hypothesized to be determinants of the observed gender differences in selecting into competitive environments.

Per Fredriksson , John A List, Warren McHone , Daniel L Millimet

Cited by*: 59 Downloads*: 20

This study examines the effects of air quality regulation on economic activity. Anecdotal evidence and some recent empirical studies suggest that an inverse relationship exists between the stringency of environmental regulations and new plant formations. Using a unique county-level data set for New York State from 1980 to 1990, we revisit this conjecture using a seminonparametric method based on propensity score matching. Our empirical estimates suggest that pollution-intensive plants are responding to environmental regulations; more importantly, we find that traditional parametric methods used in previous studies may dramatically understate the impact of more stringent regulations.

Henk Folmer, Tim Jeppesen, John A List

Cited by*: 19 Downloads*: 20

Stricter environmental regulations are often opposed on the grounds that they will alter equilibrium capital flows. Empirical evidence in this area remains largely unresolved, mainly due to the quite disparate results found in the literature. This paper takes a positive look at the relationship between new manufacturing plant location decisions and environmental regulations by examining data from 11 studies that provide more than 365 observations. One major result from our meta-analysis is that methodological considerations play a critical role in shaping the body of received estimates. Our empirical estimates also lend insights into future research that is necessary before any robust conclusions can be made regarding the effects of environmental regulations on capital flows.

Uri Gneezy, Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 98

Competitiveness pervades life: plants compete for sunlight and water, animals for territory and food, and humans for mates and income. Here we investigate human competitiveness with a natural experiment and a set of behavioral experiments. We compare competitiveness in traditional fishing societies where local natural forces determine whether fishermen work in isolation or in collectives. We find sharp evidence that fishermen from individualistic societies are far more competitive than fishermen from collectivistic societies and that this difference emerges with work experience. These findings suggest that humans can evolve traits to specific needs, support the idea that socio-ecological factors play a decisive role for individual competitiveness, and provide evidence how individualistic and collectivistic societies shape economic behaviour.

Roland Fryer , Steven D Levitt, John A List, Sally Sadoff

Cited by*: 43 Downloads*: 11

Domestic attempts to use financial incentives for teachers to increase student achievement have been ineffective. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting the power of loss aversion--teachers are paid in advance and asked to give back the money if their students do not improve sufficiently--increases math test scores between 0.201 (0.076) and 0.398 (0.129) standard deviations. This is equivalent to increasing teacher quality by more than one standard deviation. A second treatment arm, identical to the loss aversion treatment but implemented in the standard fashion, yields smaller and statistically insignificant results. This suggests it is loss aversion, rather than other features of the design or population sampled, that leads to the stark differences between our findings and past research.

Omar Al-Ubaydli, John A List, Dana L Suskind

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 87

No abstract available

Jeffrey A Flory, Uri Gneezy, Kenneth Leonard, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 88

Research on competitiveness at the individual level has emphasized sex as a physiological determinant, focusing on the gap in preference for competitive environments between young men and women. This study presents evidence that women's preferences over competition change with age such that the gender gap, while large for young adults, disappears in older populations due to the fact that older women are much more competitive. Our finding that tastes for competition appear just as strong among older women as they are among men suggests a simple gender-based view of competitiveness is misleading; age seems just as important as sex. These findings are consistent with one of the most commonly cited views on the deeper origins of gender differences: that they stem at least in part from human evolution.

Alexander G James, John A List, James J Murphy, Michael K Price

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

We partnered with Alaska's Pick.Click.Give. Charitable Contributions Program to implement a statewide natural field experiment with 540,000 Alaskans designed to explore whether targeted appeals emphasizing donor benefits through warm glow impact donations. Results highlight the relative import of appeals to self. Individuals who received such an appeal were 4.5 percent more likely to give and gave 20 percent more than counterparts in the control group. Yet, a message that instead appealed to recipient benefits had no effect on average donations relative to the control group. We also find evidence of long-run effects of warm glow appeals in the subsequent year.

John A List, Fatemeh Momeni, Michael Vlassopoulos, Yves Zenou

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

This study explores the role of neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age. We do so by estimating the spillover effects of an early childhood intervention on the educational attainment of a large sample of disadvantaged children in the United States. We document large spillover effects on the cognitive skills of children living near treated children, which amount to approximately 40% of the direct treatment effects. Interestingly, these spillover effects are localized and decrease with the spatial distance to treated neighbors. We do not find evidence of spillover effects on non-cognitive skills. Perhaps our most novel insight is the underlying mechanisms at work: the spillover effect on cognitive scores is very localized and seems to operate through the child's social network, mostly between treated kids. We do not find evidence that parents' or children's social networks are effective for non-cognitive skills. Overall, our results reveal the importance of public programs and neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age, highlighting that human capital accumulation is fundamentally a social activity.

Snigdha Gupta, Maggie C. Kane, John A List, Liz Sablich, Lauren Supplee, Dana L Suskind

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Recommendations for Mitigating Threats to Scaling

Amanda Chuan, John A List, Anya Samek, Shreemayi Samujjwala

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Parental investments shape children's educational specializations. Using a longitudinal study, we find that parents invest more in daughters than sons at ages 3-5. We find that early parental investment can explain persistently higher English scores for girls than boys 4-6 years later. However, there is no gender gap in Math. Parental investments at ages 3-5 appear to contribute to girls' advantage in English but have little impact on Math. Our results suggest that parental investments at early ages contributes to girls' comparative advantage in English.

Omar Al-Ubaydli, Jason Chien-Yu, John A List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

The "voltage effect" is defined as the tendency for a program's efficacy to change when it is scaled up, which in most cases results in the absolute size of a program's treatment effects to diminish when the program is scaled. Understanding the scaling problem and taking steps to diminish voltage drops are important because if left unaddressed, the scaling problem can weaken the public's faith in science, and it can lead to a misallocation of public resources. There exists a growing literature illustrating the prevalence of the scaling problem, explaining its causes, and proposing countermeasures. This paper adds to the literature by providing a simple model of the scaling problem that is consistent with rational expectations by the key stakeholders. Our model highlights that asymmetric information is a key contributor to the voltage effect.

Samuel Chang, Andrew Kennedy, Aaron Leonard, John A. List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

We provide twelve best practices and discuss how each practice can help researchers accurately, credibly, and ethically use Generative AI (GenAI) to enhance experimental research. We split the twelve practices into four areas. First, in the pre-treatment stage, we discuss how GenAI can aid in pre-registration procedures, data privacy concerns, and ethical considerations specific to GenAI usage. Second, in the design and implementation stage, we focus on GenAI's role in identifying new channels of variation, piloting and documentation, and upholding the four exclusion restrictions. Third, in the analysis stage, we explore how prompting and training set bias can impact results as well as necessary steps to ensure replicability. Finally, we discuss forward-looking best practices that are likely to gain importance as GenAI evolves.