Papers - John A List
James Andreoni,
Amalia Di Girolamo,
John A List,
Claire Mackevicius,
Anya Samek
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None 
We conduct experiments eliciting risk preferences with over 1,400 children and adolescents aged 3-15 years old. We complement our data with an assessment of cognitive and executive function skills. First, we find that adolescent girls display significantly greater risk aversion than adolescent boys. This pattern is not observed among young children, suggesting that the risk gap in risk preferences emerges in early adolescence. Second, we find that at all ages in our study, cognitive skills (specifically math ability) are positively associated with risk taking. Executive functions among children, and soft skills among adolescents, are negatively associated with risk taking. Third, we find that greater risk-tolerance is associated with higher likelihood of disciplinary referrals, which provides evidence that our task is equipped to measure a relevant behavioral outcome. For academics, our research provides a deeper understanding of the developmental origins of risk preferences and highlights the important role of cognitive and executive function skills to better understand the association between risk preferences and cognitive abilities over the studied age range.
Luigi Butera,
Philip J Grossman,
Daniel Houser,
John A List,
Marie-Claire Villeval
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Creation of empirical knowledge in economics has taken a dramatic turn in the past few decades. One feature of the new research landscape is the nature and extent to which scholars generate data. Today, in nearly every field the experimental approach plays an increasingly crucial role in testing theories and informing organizational decisions. Whereas there is much to appreciate about this revolution, recently a credibility crisis has taken hold across the social sciences, arguing that an important component of Fischer (1935)'s tripod has not been fully embraced: replication. Indeed, while the importance of replications is not debatable scientifically, current incentives are not sufficient to encourage replications from the individual researcher's perspective. We propose a novel mechanism that promotes replications by leveraging mutually beneficial gains between scholars and editors. We develop a model capturing the trade-offs involved in seeking independent replications before submission of a paper to journals. We showcase our method via an investigation of the effects of Knightian uncertainty on cooperation rates in public goods games, a pervasive and yet largely unexplored feature in the literature.
Yan Chen,
Peter Cramton,
John A List,
Axel Ockenfels
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We review past research and discuss future directions on how the vibrant research areas of market design and behavioral economics have influenced and will continue to impact the science and practice of management in both the private and public sectors. Using examples from various auction markets, reputation and feedback systems in online markets, matching markets in education, and labor markets, we demonstrate that combining market design theory, behavioral insights, and experimental methods can lead to fruitful implementation of superior market designs in practice.
John A List
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All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
John A List
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"Putting Economic Research into Practice at Businesses (to Inform Science and Major Social Challenges)"
Slides from ASSA NABE
Marco Castillo,
John A List,
Ragan Petrie,
Anya Samek
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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.
Gary Charness,
John A List,
Aldo Rustichini,
Anya Samek,
Jeroen van de Ven
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Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to correctly attribute mental states to others, is important in social interactions. We evaluate the development of ToM in about 800 mostly disadvantaged children. We next conduct a field experiment with about 160 children in which we find that the low ToM rates for these disadvantaged children improve substantially in environments where the presence of other children is made salient. We see that ToM performance increases for both younger and older children in the treatment with strong salience, but that the treatment with weaker salience seems to be only effective in improving the ToM rates for older children.
John A List,
Fatemeh Momeni
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We use a natural field experiment in which we hired over 2000 workers from an online labor market to explore how upfront payment affects worker motivation and misbehavior on the job. We start with a simple theory that shows paying upfront can increase misbehavior through reducing the perceived costs of cheating, but it can decrease misbehavior through generating a gift-exchange effect. Motivated by the theory, we designed a task that provided workers with opportunities to reciprocate or misbehave. A unique aspect of our design is that we are permitted an opportunity to measure the curvature of the gift-exchange value of the upfront payment. Our results suggest paying workers upfront induces a gift-exchange effect that is concave in the share of total wage paid upfront. Moreover, the impact is strong enough to suggest that small upfront payments are a cost-effective means for an employer to curb employee misbehavior.
Alec Brandon,
John A List,
Robert D Metcalfe,
Michael K Price,
Florian Rundhammer
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This study considers the response of household electricity consumption to social nudges during peak load events. Our investigation considers two social nudges. The first targets conservation during peak load events, while the second promotes aggregate conservation. Using data from a natural field experiment with 42,100 households, we find that both social nudges reduce peak load electricity consumption by 2 to 4% when implemented in isolation and by nearly 7% when implemented in combination. These findings suggest an important role for social nudges in the regulation of electricity markets and a limited role for crowd out effects.
Eszter Czibor,
David Jimenez-Gomez,
John A List
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What was once broadly viewed as an impossibility - learning from experimental data in economics - has now become commonplace. Governmental bodies, think tanks, and corporations around the world employ teams of experimental researchers to answer their most pressing questions. For their part, in the past two decades academics have begun to more actively partner with organizations to generate data via field experimentation. While this revolution in evidence-based approaches has served to deepen the economic science, recently a credibility crisis has caused even the most ardent experimental proponents to pause. This study takes a step back from the burgeoning experimental literature and introduces 12 actions that might help to alleviate this credibility crisis and raise experimental economics to an even higher level. In this way, we view our "12 action wish list" as discussion points to enrich the field.
John A List
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This review summarizes the historical place of the seminal contribution of Kahneman et al. (1990), from origins to theory to catalyst of an entire area of scholarship. This new literature has produced evidence both in concert with the original KKT conclusions as well as evidence refuting certain insights from KKT. The general theme of my summary is that even imperfect papers can have deep impact, both within and outside the academy; a lesson that today's critics should consider as young experimentalists continue to fight the tyranny of the top 5.
John A List
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While empirical economics has made important strides over the past half century, there is a recent attack that threatens the foundations of the empirical approach in economics: external validity. Certain dogmatic arguments are not new, yet in some circles the generalizability question is beyond dispute, rendering empirical work as a passive enterprise based on frivolity. Such arguments serve to caution even the staunchest empirical advocates from even starting an empirical inquiry in a novel setting. In its simplest form, questions of external validity revolve around whether the results of the received study can be generalized to different people, situations, stimuli, and time periods. This study clarifies and places the external validity crisis into perspective by taking a unique glimpse into the grandest of trials: The External Validity Trial. A key outcome of the proceedings is an Author Onus Probandi, which outlines four key areas that every study should report to address external validity. Such an evaluative approach properly rewards empirical advances and justly recognizes inherent empirical limitations.
Marvin Cardoza,
Justin Holz,
John A List,
Alejandro Zentner,
Joaquin Zentner
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This paper uses a natural field experiment to examine the effectiveness of specific nudges on tax compliance amongst firms and the self-employed in the Dominican Republic. In collaboration with the Dominican Republic's tax authority, we designed messages for more than 28,000 self-employed workers and over 56,000 firms. Leveraging administrative tax data, we find evidence that our nudges (increasing the salience of prison sentences or public disclosure of tax evaders) have large effects on increasing tax compliance, primarily working through the channel of decreasing claimed tax exemptions. Interestingly, we find that firms are more impacted than the self-employed, and that firm size is critically linked to nudge effectiveness: larger firms are considerably more influenced by nudges than smaller firms. We find this latter result noteworthy given the paucity of evidence showing significant behavioral impacts of nudges amongst the largest players in a market. Overall, our messages increased tax revenue by $193 million (roughly 0.23% of the Dominican Republic's GDP in 2018), with over $100 million constituting income that the government would not have received without our field experimental nudges.
Eric Floyd,
Michael Hallsworth,
John A List,
Robert D Metcalfe,
Kristian Rotaru,
Ivo Vlaev
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
In this study, we first present a large natural field experiment that tested messages
aimed at increasing tax compliance. We find that the main drivers of changes in
compliance are messages describing the monitoring and enforcement behavior of
the tax collector. A second natural field experiment built on the results of the first
experiment to further investigate what kinds of costs resulting from tax collector
oversight are salient to taxpayers. Specific time and cognitive incentives did not
significantly increase payment rates, whereas stating non-specific costs of inaction
did. Additional analyses suggest the increase in compliance is likely due to a 'fill
in the blank' effect in which taxpayers assume the consequence is a fine.
Interestingly, specifically stating maximum fine or jailtime consequences have the
largest effect in a laboratory setting but only if the consequences are interpreted as
realistic. Overall, our study reinforces that tax authorities can use short messages
to increase tax compliance; the estimated accelerated revenue from the two field
studies amounts to 9.9m GBP.
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.
Annika List,
John A List,
Anya Samek
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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 J Benjamin,
James O Berger,
Magnus Johannesson,
Brian A Nosek,
E. J Wagenmakers,
Richard Berk,
Kenneth A Bollen,
Bjorn Brembs,
Lawrence Brown,
Colin F Camerer,
David Cesarini,
Christopher D. Chambers,
Merlise Clyde,
Thomas D Cook,
Paul De Boeck,
Zoltan Dienes,
Anna Dreber,
Kenny Easwaran,
Charles Efferson,
Ernst Fehr,
Fiona Fidler,
Andy P. Field,
Malcom Forster,
Edward I. George,
Tarun Ramadorai,
Richard Gonzalez,
Steven Goodman,
Edwin Green,
Donald P Green,
Anthony Greenwald,
Jarrod D. Hadfield,
Larry V. Hedges,
Leonhard Held,
Teck Hau Ho,
Herbert Hoijtink,
James Holland Jones,
Daniel J Hruschka,
Kosuke Imai,
Guido Imbens,
John P.A. Ioannidis,
Minjeong Jeon,
Michael Kirchler,
David Laibson ,
John A List,
Roderick Little,
Arthur Lupia,
Edouard Machery,
Scott E. Maxwell,
Michael McCarthy,
Don Moore,
Stephen L. Morgan,
Marcus Munafo,
Shinichi Nakagawa,
Brendan Nyhan,
Timothy H Parker,
Luis Pericchi,
Marco Perugini,
Jeff Rouder,
Judith Rousseau,
Victoria Savalei,
Felix D. Schonbrodt,
Thomas Sellke,
Betsy Sinclair,
Dustin Tingley,
Trisha Van Zandt,
Simine Vazire,
Duncan J. Watts,
Christopher Winship,
Robert L. Wolpert,
Yu Xie,
Cristobal Young,
Jonathan Zinman,
Valen E. Johnson
Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 965
We propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance for claims of new discoveries from 0.05 to 0.005.
Luigi Butera,
John A List
Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 355
Novel empirical insights by their very nature tend to be unanticipated, and in some cases at odds with the current state of knowledge on the topic. The mechanics of statistical inference suggest that such initial findings, even when robust and statistically significant within the study, should not appreciably move priors about the phenomenon under investigation. Yet, a few well-conceived independent replications dramatically improve the reliability of novel findings. Nevertheless, the incentives to replicate are seldom in place in the sciences, especially within the social sciences. We propose a simple incentive-compatible mechanism to promote replications, and use experimental economics to highlight our approach. We begin by reporting results from an experiment in which we investigate how cooperation in allocation games is affected by the presence of Knightian uncertainty (ambiguity), a pervasive and yet unexplored characteristic of most public goods. Unexpectedly, we find that adding uncertainty enhances cooperation. This surprising result serves as a test case for our mechanism: instead of sending this paper to a peer-reviewed journal, we make it available online as a working paper, but we commit never to submit it to a journal for publication. We instead offered co-authorship for a second, yet to be written, paper to other scholars willing to independently replicate our study. That second paper will reference this working paper, will include all replications, and will be submitted to a peer- reviewed journal for publication. Our mechanism allows mutually-beneficial gains from trade between the original investigators and other scholars, alleviates the publication bias problem that often surrounds novel experimental results, and accelerates the advancement of economic science by leveraging the mechanics of statistical inference.
John A List,
Azeem M Shaikh,
Yang Xu
Cited by*: 33 Downloads*: 278
Empiricism in the sciences allows us to test theories, formulate optimal policies, and learn how the world works. In this manner, it is critical that our empirical work provides accurate conclusions about underlying data patterns. False positives represent an especially important problem, as vast public and private resources can be misguided if we base decisions on false discovery. This study explores one especially pernicious influence on false positives-multiple hypothesis testing (MHT). While MHT potentially affects all types of empirical work, we consider three common scenarios where MHT influences inference within experimental economics: jointly identifying treatment effects for a set of outcomes, estimating heterogenous treatment effects through subgroup analysis, and conducting hypothesis testing for multiple treatment conditions. Building upon the work of Romano and Wolf (2010), we present a correction procedure that incorporates the three scenarios, and illustrate the improvement in power by comparing our results with those obtained by the classic studies due to Bonferroni (1935) and Holm (1979). Importantly, under weak assumptions, our testing procedure asymptotically controls the familywise error rate - the probability of one false rejection - and is asymptotically balanced. We showcase our approach by revisiting the data reported in Karlan and List (2007), to deepen our understanding of why people give to charitable causes.
John A List,
Anya Samek,
Dana L Suskind
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 258
Behavioral economics and field experiments within the social sciences have advanced well beyond academic curiosum. Governments around the globe as well as the most powerful firms in modern economies employ staffs of behavioralists and experimentalists to advance and test best practices. In this study, we combine behavioral economics with field experiments to reimagine a new model of early childhood education. Our approach has three distinct features. First, by focusing public policy dollars on prevention rather than remediation, we call for much earlier educational programs than currently conceived. Second, our approach has parents at the center of the education production function rather than at its periphery. Third, we advocate attacking the macro education problem using a public health methodology, rather than focusing on piecemeal advances.