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John A List

Cited by*: 13 Downloads*: 59

No abstract available

John A List

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 6

Walrasian tatonnement has been a fundamental assumption in economics ever since Walras' general equilibrium theory was introduced in 1874. Nearly a century after its introduction, Vernon Smith relaxed the Walrasian tatonnement assumption by showing that neoclassical competitive market theory explains the equilibrating forces in ""double- auction"" markets. I make a next step in this evolution by exploring the predictive power of neoclassical theory in decentralized naturally occurring markets. Using data gathered from two distinct markets--the sports card and collector pin markets--I find a tendency for exchange prices to approach the neoclassical competitive model prediction after a few market periods.

John A List

Cited by*: 16 Downloads*: 19

Public policy decision making often requires balancing the benefits of a policy with the costs. While regulators in the United States and abroad rely heavily on benefit-cost analysis, critics contend that hypothetical bias precludes one of the most popular benefit estimation techniques--contingent surveys--from providing reliable economic values for nonmarket goods and services. This paper explores a new methodology to obtain the total value of nonmarket goods and services--random nth price auctions. The empirical work revolves around examining behavior of 360 participants in a competitive marketplace, where subjects naturally buy, sell, and trade commodities. The field experiment provides some preliminary evidence that hypothetical random nth price auctions can, in certain situations, reveal demand truthfully.

John A List

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 6

This paper pits neoclassical theory against prospect theory by investigating several clean tests of the competing hypotheses. Consistent with previous work, the field experimental data suggest that prospect theory adequately organizes behavior among inexperienced consumers, whereas consumers with intense market experience behave largely in accordance with neoclassical predictions. The data indicate that the convergence in values occurs entirely because of lower Hicksian equivalent surplus values.

John A List

Cited by*: 16 Downloads*: 22

A vibrant literature has emerged that suggests willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures of value are quite different for inexperienced consumers but that value differences erode with market experience. One potential shortcoming of this literature is that market experience is endogenous. This study presents a framed field experiment that exogenously induces market experience. Empirical findings support the premise that market experience, alone, can eliminate an important market anomaly.

John A List

Cited by*: 136 Downloads*: 30

The role of the market in mitigating and mediating various forms of behavior is perhaps the central issue facing behavioral economics today. This study designs a field experiment that is explicitly linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine whether, and to what extent, social preferences influence outcomes in actual market transactions. While agents drawn from a well-functioning marketplace behave in accord with social preference models in tightly controlled laboratory experiments, when observed in their naturally occurring settings their behavior approaches what is predicted by self-interest theory. In the limit, much of the observed behavior in the marketplace that is consistent with social preferences is due to reputational concerns: suppliers who expect to have future interactions with buyers provide higher product quality only when the buyer can verify quality via a third-party certifier. The data also speak to theories of how reputation effects enhance market performance. In particular, reputation and the monitoring of quality are found to be complements, and findings suggest that the private market can solve the lemons problem through third party verification.

Anthony Heyes, John A List

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 157

No abstract available

John A List, Zacharias Maniadis, Fabio Tufano

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 3

In his comment, Mitesh Kataria (2014) makes three main points about a specific part of our paper (Maniadis, Tufano, and List 2014), namely about Tables 2 and 3. In our paper, we employ these tables in order to illustrate the idea that very inconclusive post-study probabilities that a tested phenomenon is true may result from novel, surprising findings. The main arguments in Kataria (2014) are the following: First, if P(H0) is unknown, as is often the case with economic applications, the post-study probability can lead to even worse inference than the Classical significance test, depending on the quality of the prior. Second, the simulation in Maniadis et al. (2014) ignores previous assessments of P(H0) and instead utilizes a selective empirical setup that favors the use of post-study probabilities. [Third,] contrary to what Maniadis et al. (2014) argue, their results do not allow for drawing general recommendations about which approach is the most appropriate. (Kataria 2014, abs.) We believe that our work might have been misunderstood by Kataria. Moreover, it seems that some of his claims are not supported by relevant empirical evidence.

John A List

Cited by*: 33 Downloads*: 10

Through good and bad economic times, charitable gifts have continued to roll in largely unabated over the past half century. In a typical year, total charitable gifts of money now exceed 2 percent of gross domestic product. Moreover, charitable giving has nearly doubled in real terms since 1990, and the number of nonprofit organizations registered with the IRS grew by nearly 60 percent from 1995 to 2005. This study provides a perspective on the economic interplay of three types of actors: donors, charitable organizations, and government. How much is given annually? Who gives? Who are the recipients of these gifts? Would changes in the tax treatment of charitable contributions lead to more or less giving? How can charitable institutions design mechanisms to generate the greatest level of gifts? What about the effectiveness of seed money and matching grants?

John A List

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 3

This study examines data drawn from the game show Friend or Foe?, which is similar to the classic prisoner's dilemma tale: partnerships are endogenously determined, players work together to earn money, after which, they play a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game over large stakes: varying from $200 to (potentially) more than $22,000. If one were to conduct such an experiment in the laboratory, the cost to gather the data would be well over $350,000. The data reveal several interesting insights; perhaps most provocatively, they suggest that even though the game is played in front of an audience of millions of viewers, there is some evidence consistent with a model of discrimination. The observed patterns of social discrimination are unanticipated, however. For example, there is evidence consistent with the notion that certain populations have a general "distaste" for older participants.

Craig Gallet, John A List, Peter Orazem

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 0

The 1987 academic market was strong, whereas the 1997 market was weak. A multimarket theory of optimal search suggests that job seekers will respond to a weakening market by changing their search strategies at the extensive margin (which markets to enter) and the intensive margin (how many applications to submit per market). Employers respond to the weakening market by raising their hiring standards. High-quality applicants will obtain an increased share of academic interviews in weak markets while applicants from weaker schools will increasingly secure interviews outside of the academic market. Empirical results show that in the bust market, graduates of elite schools shifted their search strategies to include weaker academic institutions, while graduates of lower-ranked schools shifted their applications away from academia and toward the business sector. In bust conditions, academic institutions increasingly concentrate their interviews on elite school graduates, women, and U.S. residents

Ted Gayer, John Horowitz, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 0

Clear Skies is an economist's approach to pollution reduction. We heartily endorse its core approach, while recommending surgery for a few minor blemishes.

Richard Damania, Per Fredriksson , John A List

Cited by*: 45 Downloads*: 34

This study explores the linkages between trade policy, corruption, and environmental policy. We begin by presenting a theoretical model that produces several testable predictions, including: (i) the effect of trade liberalization on the stringency of environmental policy depends on the level of corruption; and (ii) corruption reduces environmental policy stringency. Using panel data from a mix of developed and developing countries from 1982 to 1992, we find evidence that supports these conjectures. We view these results as representing an attempt at understanding the myriad of complex relationships that exist in an open economy.

John A List, Fatemeh Momeni

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 82

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a cornerstone of modern business practice, developing from a "why" in the 1960s to a "must" today. Early empirical evidence on both the demand and supply sides has largely confirmed CSR's efficacy. This paper combines theory with a large-scale natural field experiment to connect CSR to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than 3,000 workers, we find that our usage of CSR increases employee misbehavior - 20% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duty when we introduce CSR. Complementary treatments suggest that "moral licensing" is at work, in that the "doing good" nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that hurts the firm. In this way, our data highlight a potential dark cloud of CSR, and serve to forewarn that such business practices should not be blindly applied.

John A List, Zacharias Maniadis, Fabio Tufano

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

The sciences are in an era o fan alleged "credibility crisis'. In this study, we discuss the reproducibility of empirical results, focusing on economics research. By combining theory and empirical evidence, we discuss the import of replication studies, and whether they improve our confidence in novel findings. The theory sheds light on the importance of replications, even when replications are subject to bias. We then present a pilot meta-study of replication in experimental economics, a subfield serving as a positive benchmark for investigating the credibility of economics. Our meta-study highlights certain difficulties when applying meta-research (Ioannidis et al., 2015) and systematizing the economics literature.

John A List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

A summary of artefactual field experiments on fieldexperiments.com.

Eliot Abrams, Jonathan Libgober, John A List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

The past few decades have ushered in an experimental revolution in economics whereby scholars are now much more likely to generate their own data. While there are virtues associated with this movement, there are concomitant difficulties. Several scientific disciplines, including economics, have launched research registries in an effort to attenuate key inferential issues. This study assesses registries both empirically and theoretically, with a special focus on the AEA registry. We find that over 90% of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in economics do not register, only 50% of the RCTs that register do so before the intervention begins, and the majority of these preregistrations are not detailed enough to significantly aid inference. Our empirical analysis further shows that using other scientific registries as aspirational examples is misguided, as their perceived success in tackling the main issues is largely a myth. In light of these facts, we advance a simple economic model to explore potential improvements. A key insight from the model is that removal of the (current) option to register completed RCTs could increase the fraction of trials that register. We also argue that linking IRB applications to registrations could further increase registry effectiveness.

John A List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

"Putting Economic Research into Practice at Businesses (to Inform Science and Major Social Challenges)" Slides from ASSA NABE

John A. List, Haruka Uchida

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Excellence gaps - disparities in advanced academic achievement - between racial groups appear by age 8 or 9 and persist throughout secondary school in the United States. About one-third of the gap is due to socio-economic status and one-tenth to school factors, indicating that policies should address both educational and local environments.