Papers - All

Melissa R Michelson, Herbert Villa Jr.

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 21

Less than a third of Latinos vote in Presidential elections, while less than one fourth participate in Congressional elections. Turnout among young Latinos (age 18-25) is even lower. This paper describes the results of a field experiment aimed at increasing turnout among young Latinos in Fresno, California conducted in the fall of 2002. Canvassers went door-to-door during the final two weekends before Election Day to urge registered young people to go to the polls. Young people of all races/ethnicities were targeted. In addition to testing the effectiveness of personal contact and how this varies among registered voters of various races/ ethnicities, the project also included two imbedded experiments. First, the race/ethnicity of the canvassers was randomly assigned, to test whether Latinos and non-Latinos are equally effective at getting Latinos and non- Latinos to the polls. Second, the message delivered to contacted registered voters was randomly assigned, to test whether young Latinos are more receptive to a message which stresses group solidarity or one that emphasizes civic duty. The experiment demonstrates that Latino canvassers are better than non-Latinos at contacting young Latino voters, and that young Latinos are more receptive than are non-Latinos to door-todoor mobilization efforts.

Ryan D Friedrichs, David C King, David W Nickerson

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

Recent large-scale field experiments of get out the vote (GOTV) drives have been non-partisan and may not accurately capture the effectiveness of partisan campaign outreach. In the 2002 Michigan gubernatorial election, a large field experiment across 14 state house districts evaluated the cost effectiveness of three mobilization technologies utilized by the Michigan Democratic Party's Youth Coordinated Campaign: door hangers, volunteer phone calls, and face-to-face visits. The results indicate that all three GOTV strategies possess similar cost-effectiveness.

Maria De Paola, Rosanna Nistico, Vincenzo Scoppa

Cited by*: 10 Downloads*: 4

We evaluate the effectiveness of monetary incentives in enhancing student performance using a randomized experiment involving undergraduate students enrolled at a southern Italian University. Students were assigned to three different groups: a high-reward group, a low-reward group, and a control group. Rewards were given to the 30 best-performing students in each group. Financial rewards increase student performance. High-ability students react strongly whereas the effect is null for low-ability students. Large and small rewards produce very similar effects. These effects also persist in subsequent years, when the financial incentives are no longer in place. No types of crowding-out effects of the monetary incentives are found.

Benjamin A Olken

Cited by*: 19 Downloads*: 38

This paper uses a randomized field experiment to examine several approaches to reducing corruption. I measure missing expenditures in over 600 village road projects in Indonesia by having engineers independently estimate the prices and quantities of all inputs used in each road, and then comparing these estimates to villages' official expenditure reports. I find that announcing an increased probability of a government audit, from a baseline of 4 percent to 100 percent, reduced missing expenditures by about 8 percentage points, more than enough to make these audits cost-effective. By contrast, I find that increasing grass-roots participation in the monitoring process only reduced missing wages, with no effect on missing materials expenditures. Since materials account for three-quarters of total expenditures, increasing grass-roots participation had little impact overall. The findings suggest that grass-roots monitoring may be subject to free-rider problems. Overall, the results suggest that traditional top-down monitoring can play an important role in reducing corruption, even in a highly corrupt environment.

Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 17

In the rural areas of developing countries, teacher absence is a widespread problem. This paper tests whether a simple incentive program based on teacher presence can reduce teacher absence, and whether it has the potential to lead to more teaching activities and better learning. In 60 informal one-teacher schools in rural India, randomly chosen out of 120 (the treatment schools), a financial incentive program was initiated to reduce absenteeism. Teachers were given a camera with a tamper-proof date and time function, along with instructions to have one of the children photograph the teacher and other students at the beginning and end of the school day. The time and date stamps on the photographs were used to track teacher attendance. A teacher's salary was a direct function of his attendance. The remaining 60 schools served as comparison schools. The introduction of the program resulted in an immediate decline in teacher absence. The absence rate (measured using unannounced visits both in treatment and comparison schools) changed from an average of 42 percent in the comparison schools to 22 percent in the treatment schools. When the schools were open, teachers were as likely to be teaching in both types of schools, and the number of students present was roughly the same. The program positively affected child achievement levels: a year after the start of the program, test scores in program schools were 0.17 standard deviations higher than in the comparison schools and children were 40 percent more likely to be admitted into regular schools.

James Cox, John A List, Michael K Price, Vjollca Sadiraj, Anya Samek

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 123

The literature exploring other regarding behavior sheds important light on interesting social phenomena, yet less attention has been given to how the received results speak to foundational assumptions within economics. Our study synthesizes the empirical evidence, showing that recent work challenges convex preference theory but is largely consistent with rational choice theory. Guided by this understanding, we design a new, more demanding test of a central tenet of economics - the contraction axiom - within a sharing framework. Making use of more than 325 dictators participating in a series of allocation games, we show that sharing choices violate the contraction axiom. We advance a new theory that augments standard models with moral reference points to explain our experimental data. Our theory also organizes the broader sharing patterns in the received literature.

Andrew Dustan, Juan Manuel Hernandez-Agramonte, Stanislao Maldonado

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

We study how non-monetary incentives, motivated by recent advances in behavioral economics, affect civil servant performance in a context where state capacity is weak. We collaborated with a government agency in Peru to experimentally vary the context of text messages targeted to civil servants in charge of a school maintenance program. These messages incorporated behavioral insights in dimensions related to information provision, social norms, and weak forms of monitoring and auditing. We find that these messages are a very cost-effective strategy to enforce compliance with national policies among civil servants. We further study the role of social norms and the salience of social benefits in a follow-up experiment and explore the external validity or our original results by implementing a related experiment with civil servants from a different national program. The findings of these new experiments support our original results and provide additional insights regarding the context in which these incentives may work. Our results highlight the importance of carefully designed non-monetary incentives as a tool to improve civil servant performance when the state lacks institutional mechanisms to enforce compliance.

Kenneth Leonard, Melkiory Masatu

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 12

The most important issue facing experimental economists is the generalizability of lab results. This letter examines more than 1200 doctor/patient consultations, in which scrutiny and duration of treatment were varied. We show that scrutiny has an important but short-lived effect.

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, Azeem M Shaikh, Atom Vayalinkal

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

List et al. (2019) provides a framework for testing multiple null hypotheses simultaneously using experimental data in which simple random sampling is used to assign treatment status to units. As in List et al. (2019), we rely on general results in Romano and Wolf (2010) to develop under weak assumptions a procedure that (i) asymptotically controls the familywise error rate – the probability of one or more false rejections – and (ii) is asymptotically balanced in that the marginal probability of rejecting any true null hypothesis is approximately equal in large samples. Our analysis departs from List et al. (2019) in that it further exploits observed, baseline covariates. The precise way in which these covariates are incorporated is based upon results in Ye et al. (2022) in order to ensure that inferences are typically more powerful in large samples.

Kazi Iqbal, Asad Islam, John A List, Vy Nguyen

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Whether, and to what extent, behavioral anomalies uncovered in the lab manifest themselves in the field remains of first order importance in finance and economics. We begin by examining behavior of retail traders/investors making investment decisions in constructed laboratory markets. Our results show that the behaviors of the traders are consistent with myopic loss aversion. We combine the lab results with a unique individual-level matched dataset on daily stock market transactions and portfolio positions over a two year period. We find that lab behaviors help to predict, but do not fully capture, the essential real-world trading analogs of retail traders.

John A List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

In 2019, I put together a summary of data from my field experiments website that pertained to natural field experiments (Harrison and List, 2024). Several people have asked me for updates. In this document I update all figures and numbers to show the details for 2023. I also include the description from the original paper below.

John A. List

Cited by*: Downloads*:

In 2019, I put together a summary of data from my field experiments website that pertained to natural field experiments (Harrison and List, 2004). Several people have asked me for updates. In this document I update all figures and numbers to show the details for 2024. I also include the description from the original paper below.

Glenn W Harrison, John A List

Cited by*: 23 Downloads*: 10

There has been a dramatic increase in the use of experimental methods in the past two decades. An oft-cited reason for this rise in popularity is that experimental methods provide the necessary control to estimate treatment effects in isolation of other confounding factors. We examine the relevance of experimental findings from laboratory settings that abstract from the field context of the task that theory purports to explain. Using common value auction theory as our guide, we identify naturally occurring settings in which one can test the theory. In our treatments the subjects are not picked at random, as in lab experiments with student subjects, but are deliberately identified by their trading roles in the natural field setting. We find that experienced agents bidding in familiar roles do not fall prey to the winner's curse. Yet, when experienced agents are observed bidding in an unfamiliar role, we find that they frequently fall prey to the winner's curse. We conclude that the theory predicts field behavior well when one is able to identify naturally occurring field counterparts to the key theoretical conditions.

Glenn W Harrison, John A List, Charles Towe

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 29

Does individual behavior in a laboratory setting provide a reliable indicator of behavior in a naturally occurring setting? We consider this general methodological question in the context of eliciting risk attitudes. The controls that are typically employed in laboratory settings, such as the use of abstract lotteries, could lead subjects to employ behavioral rules that differ from the ones they employ in the field. Because it is field behavior that we are interested in understanding, those controls might be a confound in themselves if they result in differences in behavior. We find that the use of artificial monetary prizes provides a reliable measure of risk attitudes when the natural counterpart outcome has minimal uncertainty, but that it can provide an unreliable measure when the natural counterpart outcome has background risk. Behavior tended to be moderately risk averse when artificial monetary prizes were used or when there was minimal uncertainty in the natural nonmonetary outcome, but subjects drawn from the same population were much more risk averse when their attitudes were elicited using the natural nonmonetary outcome that had some background risk. These results are consistent with conventional expected utility theory for the effects of background risk on attitudes to risk.

Andreas Loschel, Michael K Price, Laura Razzolini, Madeline Werthschulte

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

This study explores whether negative income shocks from the COVID-19 pandemic affect the demand for environmental policy. By running a survey in Germany in May 2020, we show that there is a large and negative correlation between the COVID-19 income shocks and the willingness to support green policies. Importantly, this relation is separate from the effect of long-run income. Building on the first evidence, our study provides directions for future valuation studies. Specifically, our results provide a proof of concept that welfare analyses based on willingness-to-pay estimates to assess the benefits of an environmental good or the cost of an environmental damage may be downward biased if temporary changes in income are not considered.

Paul Dolan, Robert D Metcalfe

Cited by*: 8 Downloads*: 6

There is increasing research on the exogenous impact of descriptive social norms on economic behavior. The research to date has a number of limitations: 1) it has not de-coupled the impact of the norm and the knowledge required to understand how to change behavior based upon it; 2) it has exclusively used offline but not online (i.e. emails) methods; and 3) it has not understood the impact of financial incentives in conjunction with norms. We address these three limitations using two natural field experiments. We find, firstly, that norms change energy behavior over a 15 month treatment period irrespective of whether information is provided or not. We find that social norms reduce consumption by around 6% (0.2 standard deviations). Norms have has their largest impact on the day that information on the social norm is received, and then decreases over time. Secondly, we do not find that social norms work online (even with experienced consumers who are used to online billing) - social norms de- livered online may have very little beneficial effects on reducing energy use. Thirdly, we find that large financial rewards work very well online in reducing consumption, with a 0.35 change in energy consumption over a four month period. Perhaps most interestingly, we find that the large effect of financial incentives is completely removed when information on social norms is added online.

John A List

Cited by*: 155 Downloads*: 34

Neoclassical theory postulates that preferences between two goods are independent of the consumer's current entitlements. Several experimental studies have recently provided strong evidence that this basic independence assumption, which is used in most theoretical and applied economic models to assess the operation of markets, is rarely appropriate. These results, which clearly contradict closely held economic doctrines, have led some influential commentators to call for an entirely new economic paradigm to displace conventional neoclassical theory e.g., prospect theory, which invokes psychological effects. This paper pits neoclassical theory against prospect theory by investigating three clean tests of the competing hypotheses. In all three cases, the data, which are drawn from nearly 500 subjects actively participating in a well-functioning marketplace, suggest that prospect theory adequately organizes behavior among inexperienced consumers, whereas consumers with intense market experience behave largely in accordance with neoclassical predictions. The pattern of results indicates that learning primarily occurs on the sell side of the market: agents with intense market experience are more willing to part with their entitlements than lesser-experienced agents.

Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel

Cited by*: 16 Downloads*: 19

We examine social learning using data from a program that promoted use of deworming medicine in Kenyan schools. These drugs kill worms in the body; although people are soon reinfected, treatment interferes with the cycle of transmission, generating positive externalities. Individuals randomly exposed to more information about deworming drugs through their social network were significantly less likely to take the drugs and more likely to believe the drugs are "not effective." This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that those exposed to the program had overly optimistic prior beliefs about net private drug benefits. The combination of strong social effects and extensive social networks among teenagers implies that a "child-to-child" public health approach focused on teenagers will speed social learning. There are large differences between social effect estimates relying on experimental variation (negative estimates) and nonexperimental methods (positive estimates).

Pasquale Marcello Falcone, Enrica Imbert, Andrea Morone, Marcello Morone, Piergiuseppe Morone

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 119

Food security, along with growing population and the associated environmental concerns, make food waste and loss a central topic in economic analysis. While food losses occur mostly at the production, postharvest and processing phases of the supply chain, food waste takes place mainly at the end of the chain and therefore concerns primarily the habits and behaviour patterns of retailers and consumers. Many solutions and practices have been proposed and oftentimes implemented in order to "keep food out of landfills", thus reducing food waste at the source. However, little attention has been paid to the possible sharing of consumer-side food surplus. In this context, food sharing could represent an effective way to tackle food waste at the consumers' level, with both environmental and economic potential positive effects. Currently, several initiatives and start-ups are being developed in the US and Europe, involving the collection and use of the excess of food from consumers and retailers and the promotion of collaborative consumption models (e.g. Foodsharing, Growington, Feastly, etc.). Nevertheless, there is still little empirical evidence testing the effectiveness of introducing sharing economy approaches to reduce food waste. This study seeks to fill this gap through a framed field experiment. We run two experimental treatments; in the control treatment students were asked to behave according to their regular food consumption habits, and in the food sharing treatment the same students were instructed to purchase food, cook and consume it collectively. Preliminary results showed that the adoption by households of food sharing practices do not automatically translate into food waste reduction. A number of factors (environmental and economic awareness, domestic skills and collaborative behaviors) might act as 'enablers' to make sharing practices effective.