Papers - John A List

Marco Castillo, John A List, Ragan Petrie, Anya Samek

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

We use field experiments with nearly 900 children to investigate how skills developed at ages 3-5 drive later-life outcomes. We find that skills map onto three distinct factors - cognitive skills, executive functions, and economic preferences. Returning to the children up to 7 years later, we find that executive functions, but not cognitive skills, predict the likelihood of receiving disciplinary referrals. Economic preferences have an independent effect: children who displayed impatience at ages 3-5 were more likely to receive disciplinary referrals. Random assignment to a parenting program reduced disciplinary referrals. This effect was not mediated by skills or preferences.

David H Herberich, John A List

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 42

The article reports on a study that provides understanding of how risk preferences and other factors influence a farmer's decision to participate in a carbon offset market. It states incorporating background risk in a laboratory setting and drawing subjects from both a standard student population and a nonstandard farmer population helped to understand the decision making process. The study suggests that farmers are slightly more risk averse than students.

Annika List, John A List, Anya Samek

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Social scientists for years have documented the pervasiveness of discrimination in product and labor markets. While the literature has recently attempted to measure the nature of such discrimination, much less work has been done exploring the origins of discrimination. We make a modest step in this direction by reporting data from a field experiment attempting to measure discrimination amongst 3-5 years olds. Using a design that isolated discriminatory behaviors in economic games, we find that both White and Hispanic children send more resources to Black children than White children, whereas black children send equal amounts. This provides a first glimpse that suggests preferences amongst the young do not show similar patterns as preferences of adults.

Daniel Houser, John A List, Marco Piovesan, Anya Samek, Joachim Winter

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 88

Acts of dishonesty permeate life. Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economics approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different contexts. We conduct an experiment that includes both parents and their young children as subjects, exploring the roles of moral cost and scrutiny on dishonest behavior. We find that the highest level of dishonesty occurs in settings where the parent acts alone and the dishonest act benefits the child. In this spirit, there is also an interesting, quite different, effect of children on parents' behavior: parents act more honestly under the scrutiny of daughters than under the scrutiny of sons. This finding sheds new light on the origins of the widely documented gender differences in cheating behavior observed among adults, where a typical result is that females are more honest than males.

Charles Godward , John A List, Mark Thompson

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 4

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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.

Erwin Bulte, Aart de Zeeuw, Shelby Gerking, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 8

Measuring preferences via stated methods remains the only technique to obtain the total economic value of a non-marketed good or service. This study examines if alternative causes of an environmental problem affect individual statements of compensation demanded. Making use of a unique sample drawn from the Netherlands, we find that Hicksian equivalent surplus (ES) is not significantly affected by causes of environmental harm. While our finding that agents only care about outcomes, rather than causes, is consonant with standard applications of utility theory, it is at odds with some recent experimental findings measuring the effects of cause on Hicksian compensating surplus (CS).

Jeffrey A Flory, Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 12 Downloads*: 3

Recently an important line of research using laboratory experiments has provided a new potential reason for why we observe gender imbalances in labor markets: men are more competitively inclined than women. Whether, and to what extent, such preferences yield differences in naturally-occurring labor market outcomes remains an open issue. We address this question by exploring job-entry decisions in a natural field experiment where we randomized nearly 7,000 interested job-seekers into different compensation regimes. By varying the role that individual competition plays in setting the wage, we are able to explore whether competition, by itself, can cause differential job entry. The data highlight the power of the compensation regime in that women disproportionately shy away from competitive work settings. Yet, there are important factors that attenuate the gender differences, including whether the job is performed in teams, whether the job task is female-oriented, and the local labor market.

Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Labor force composition and the allocation of talent remain of vital import to modern economies. For their part, governments and companies around the globe have implemented equal employment opportunity (EEO) regulations to influence labor market flows. Even though such regulations are pervasive, surprisingly little is known about their impacts. We use a natural field experiment conducted across 10 U.S. cities to investigate if EEO statements in job advertisements affect the first step in the employment process, application rates. Making use of data from nearly 2,500 job seekers, we find considerable policy effects, but in an unexpected direction: the presence of an EEO statement dampens rather than encourages racial minorities willingness to apply for jobs. Importantly, the effects are particularly pronounced for educated job seekers and in cities with white majority populations. Complementary survey evidence suggests the underlying mechanism at work is "tokenism", revealing that EEO statements backfire because racial minorities avoid environments in which they are perceived as regulatory, or symbolic, hires rather than being hired on their own merits. Beyond their practical and theoretical importance, our results highlight how field experiments can significantly improve policy making. In this case, if one goal of EEO regulations is to enhance the pool of minority applicants, then it is not working.

John A List

Cited by*: 262 Downloads*: 100

This study examines individual behavior in two well-functioning marketplaces to investigate whether market experience eliminates the endowment effect. Field evidence from both markets suggests that individual behavior converges to the neoclassical prediction as market experience increases. In an experimental test of whether these observations are due to treatment (market experience) or selection (e.g., static preferences), I find that market experience plays a significant role in eliminating the endowment effect. I also find that these results are robust to institutional change and extend beyond the two marketplaces studied. Overall, this study provides strong evidence that market experience eliminates an important market anomaly.

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.

Dean S Karlan, John A List

Cited by*: 37 Downloads*: 17

We conducted a natural field experiment to explore the effect of price changes on charitable contributions. To operationalize our tests, we examine whether an offer to match contributions to a non-profit organization changes the likelihood and amount that an individual donates. Direct mail solicitations were sent to over 50,000 prior donors. We find that the match offer increases both the revenue per solicitation and the probability that an individual donates. While comparisons of the match treatments and the control group consistently reveal this pattern, larger match ratios (i.e., $3:$1 and $2:$1) relative to smaller match ratios ($1:$1) had no additional impact. The results have clear implications for practitioners in the design of fundraising campaigns and provide avenues for future empirical and theoretical work on charitable giving. Further, the data provide an interesting test of important methods used in cost-benefit analysis.

John A List

Cited by*: 117 Downloads*: 34

No abstract available

Amanda Chuan, John A List, Anya Samek

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Research has shown that giving disadvantaged families financial incentives to invest in their children could decrease socioeconomic inequality by enhancing human capital formation. Yet, within the household how are such gains achieved? We use a field experiment to investigate how parents allocate time when they receive financial incentives. We find that incentives increase investment in the target child. But, parents achieve these gains by substituting away from time spent with the child's sibling(s). An unintended consequence is that intrahousehold inequality increases and aggregate gains from the program are overstated when focusing only on target children.

John A List, Jeffrey A Livingston, Susanne Neckermann

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

In the face of worryingly low performance on standardized test, offering students financial incentives linked to academic performance has been proposed as a potentially cost-effective way to support improvement. However, a large literature across disciplines finds that extrinsic incentives, once removed, may crowd out intrinsic motivation on subsequent, similar tasks. We conduct a field experiment where students, parents, and tutors are offered incentives designed to encourage student preparation for a high-stakes state test. The incentives reward performance on a separate low-stakes assessment designed to measure the same skills as the high-stakes test. Performance on the high-stakes test, however, is not incentivized. We find substantial treatment effects on the incented tests but no effect on the non-incented test; if anything, the incentives result in worse performance on the non-incented test. We also find evidence supporting the conclusion that the incentives crowd out intrinsic motivation to perform well on the non-incented test, but this effect is only temporary. One year later, students who had been in the incentives treatments perform better than those in the control on the same non-incented test.

Omar Al-Ubaydli, John A List

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 89

A commonly held view is that laboratory experiments provide researchers with more "control" than natural field experiments, and that this advantage is to be balanced against the disadvantage that laboratory experiments are less generalizable. This paper presents a simple model that explores circumstances under which natural field experiments provide researchers with more control than laboratory experiments afford. This stems from the covertness of natural field experiments: laboratory experiments provide researchers with a high degree of control in the environment which participants agree to be experimental subjects. When participants systematically opt out of laboratory experiments, the researcher's ability to manipulate certain variables is limited. In contrast, natural field experiments bypass the participation decision altogether and allow for a potentially more diverse participant pool within the market of interest. We show one particular case where such selection is invaluable: when treatment effects interact with participant characteristics.

Michael S Haigh, John A List

Cited by*: 135 Downloads*: 40

Two behavioral concepts, loss aversion and mental accounting, have recently been combined to provide a theoretical explanation of the equity premium puzzle. Recent experimental evidence suggests that undergraduate students' behavior is consistent with this "myopic loss aversion" conjecture. Our suspicion is that, much like certain anomalies in the realm of riskless decisions, these behavioral tendencies will be severely attenuated when real market players are put to the task. Making use of a unique subject pool-professional futures and options pit traders recruited from the Chicago Board of Trade-we do find behavioral differences between professionals and students. Yet, rather than discovering that the anomaly disappears, the data suggest that professional traders exhibit myopic loss aversion to a greater extent than undergraduate students.

Alec Brandon, Paul J Ferraro, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe, Michael K Price, Florian Rundhammer

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 95

This study examines the mechanisms underlying long-run reductions in energy consumption caused by a widely studied social nudge. Our investigation considers two channels: physical capital in the home and habit formation in the household. Using data from 38 natural field experiments, we isolate the role of physical capital by comparing treatment and control homes after the original household moves, which ends treatment. We find 35 to 55 percent of the reductions persist once treatment ends and show this is consonant with the physical capital channel. Methodologically, our findings have important implications for the design and assessment of behavioral interventions.

Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 7 Downloads*: 74

One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job-seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the nature of sorting and the extent of salary negotiations. We observe interesting data patterns. For example, we find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, this difference disappears, and even tends to reverse. In terms of sorting, we find that men in contrast to women prefer job environments where the 'rules of wage determination' are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous.

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

Cited by*: 16 Downloads*: 27

No abstract available