Papers - Framed

Patrizia Lattarulo, Marco Mariani, Laura Razzolini

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 117

This paper reports results from a field experiment conducted to study the effect of incentives offered to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums. A vast literature exists on the design of incentives to modify the behavior of firms and consumers, but not much is known about incentives offered to adolescents and young adults to affect their cultural consumption behavior. Students in the first treatment receive a flier with basic information and opening hours of a main museum in Florence, Italy-Palazzo Vecchio. Students in the second treatment receive the flier and a short presentation conducted by an art expert about the exhibit; students in the third treatment, in addition to the flier and the presentation, receive also a non-financial reward in the form of extra-credit points toward their school grade. The analysis yields two main findings. First, non-financial reward is more effective at inducing the students to undertake the encouraged visit than either the simple presentation or the basic information with the flier. Second, over a longer time horizon the non-financial reward does not induce a significant change in behavior with respect to the simple presentation.

David Lucking-Reiley

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 11

I present experimental evidence on the effects of minimum bids in first-price, sealed-bid auctions. The auction experiments manipulated the minimum bids in a preexisting market on the Internet for collectible trading cards from the game Magic: the Gathering. I examine a number of outcomes, including the number of participating bidders, the probability of sale, the levels of individual bids, and the auctioneer's revenues. The benchmark theoretical model is one with symmetric, risk-neutral bidders with independent private values. The results verify a number of the predictions concerning equilibrium bidding. Many bidders behave strategically, anticipating the effects of the reserve price on others' bids.

Iwan Barankay, Magnus Johannesson, John A List, Richard Friberg, Matti Liski, Kjetil Storesletten

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 1

No abstract available

Jayson L Lusk, Bailey Norwood

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 5

Eliciting actual donations toward a public good has been proposed as a means of estimating a lower bound to individuals' compensating surplus, and can be accomplished using mail/phone surveys or field experiments. This study shows that when warm-glow is present, the elicitation instrument decreases the transaction costs of donating. This presents an obstacle to using the donation mechanism. As a remedy, we propose the use of a multi-donation mechanism where subjects can direct their donation to alternative public goods. Results from a field experiment confirm this instrument-induced bias can be large, suggesting field experiment practitioners should seriously consider how their experimental procedures may alter economic behavior.

Maria De Paola, Francesca Gioia, Vincenzo Scoppa

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 10

We analyze how overconfidence is affected by superstitious beliefs and emotions induced by positive and negative stimuli in a field experiment involving about 700 Italian students who were randomly assigned to numbered seats in their written examination sessions. According to widespread superstitions, some numbers are considered lucky, while others are considered unlucky. At the end of the examination, we asked students the grade they expected to get. We find that students tend to be systematically overconfident and that their overconfidence is positively affected by being assigned to a lucky number. Interestingly, males and females react differently: on the one hand, females tend to expect lower grades when assigned to unlucky numbers, while they are not affected by being assigned to lucky numbers. On the other hand, males are not affected by being assigned to unlucky numbers but expect higher grades when assigned to lucky numbers.

Frank W Marlowe

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 27

Most hypotheses proposed to explain human food sharing address motives, yet most tests of these hypotheses have measured only the patterns of food transfer. To choose between these hypotheses we need to measure people's propensity to share. To do that, I played two games (the Ultimatum and Dictator Games) with Hadza hunter-gatherers. Despite their ubiquitous food sharing, the Hadza are less willing to share in these games than people in complex societies are. They were also less willing to share in smaller camps than larger camps. I evaluate the various food-sharing hypotheses in light of these results.

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.

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.

Alex Imas, Sally Sadoff, Anya Samek

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 104

There is growing interest in the use of loss contracts that offer performance incentives as upfront payments that employees can lose. Standard behavioral models predict a tradeoff in the use of loss contracts: employees will work harder under loss contracts than under gain contracts; but, anticipating loss aversion, they will prefer gain contracts to loss contracts. In a series of experiments, we test these predictions by measuring performance and preferences for payoff-equivalent gain and loss contracts. We find that people indeed work harder under loss than gain contracts, as the theory predicts. Surprisingly, rather than a preference for the gain contract, we find that people actually prefer loss contracts. In exploring mechanisms for our results, we find suggestive evidence that people do anticipate loss aversion but select into loss contracts as a commitment device to improve performance.

Uri Gneezy, John A List, Jeffrey A Livingston, Xiangdong Qin, Sally Sadoff, Yang Xu

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 124

Tests measuring and comparing educational achievement are an important policy tool. We experimentally show that offering students extrinsic incentives to put forth effort on such achievement tests has differential effects across cultures. Offering incentives to U.S. students, who generally perform poorly on assessments, improved performance substantially. In contrast, Shanghai students, who are top performers on assessments, were not affected by incentives. Our findings suggest that in the absence of extrinsic incentives, ranking countries based on low-stakes assessments is problematic because test scores reflect differences in intrinsic motivation to perform well on the test itself, and not just differences in ability.

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

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 7

No abstract available

Richard Engelbrecht-Wiggans, John A List, David H Reiley

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 4

My coauthors and I reply to the comments of Daniel Levin on our paper "Demand Reduction in Multiunit Auctions: Evidence from a Sportscard Field Experiment." In his comment, Levin presents new theory and proposes a new equilibrium to explain annomalies reported in our earlier sportscard auction, such as higher first-unit bids under the uniform-price institution. We evaluate his theory and equilibrium in the context of both uniform-price and Vickrey auctions and point out our concerns. Where possible, we attempt to test the predictions of his theory with our existing data.

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.

Andreas Leibbrandt

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

This paper combines experimental with field data from professional sellers to study whether social preferences are related to performance in natural markets. The data show that sellers who are more pro-social in a laboratory experiment are also more successful in natural markets: they achieve higher prices, have superior trade relations and better abilities to signal trustworthiness to buyers. These findings suggest that social preferences play a significant role for outcomes in natural markets.

Laura Gee, Michael Schreck

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 11

Charitable giving has been about 2% of US GDP since the turn of the century. A popular fundraising tool is donation matching where every dollar is matched by a third party. But field experiments find that matching does not always increase donations. This may occur because individuals believe that peer donors will exhaust the matching funds. We develop a theory of how beliefs about peers' donations affect one's own likelihood of donation. We test our theory using novel "threshold match" treatments in field and laboratory experiments. These treatments form small groups and offer a flat matching bonus if a threshold number of donations is received. One "threshold match" treatment more than doubles the donation rate in the field relative to no match. To better understand the mechanism behind this huge increase, we use a lab study to replicate the field results and further show that beliefs about peers' donations matter. Our theoretical, lab, and field results combined suggest people are more likely to donate when they believe they are more pivotal to securing matching money. Beliefs about others matter, and they should be taken into account when trying to increase donations.

Julian Conrads, Tommaso Reggiani, Rainer M Rilke

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 51

Ambiguity about the chances of winning represents a key aspect in lotteries. By means of a controlled field experiment, we exogenously vary the degree of ambiguity about the winning chances of lotteries organized to incentivize the contribution for a public good. In one treatment, people have been simply informed about the maximum number of potential participants (i.e. the number of lottery tickets released). In a second treatment, this information has been omitted as in all traditional lotteries. Our general finding shows that simply reducing the degree of ambiguity of the lottery leads to a sizable and significant increase (67%) in the participation rate. This result is robust to alternative prize configurations.

Julian Conrads, Bernd Irlenbusch, Tommaso Reggiani, Rainer M Rilke, Dirk Sliwka

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 38

How to hire voluntary helpers? We shed new light on this question by reporting a field experiment in which we invited 2859 students to help at the 'ESA Europe 2012' conference. Invitation emails varied non-monetary and monetary incentives to convince subjects to offer help. Students could apply to help at the conference and, if so, also specify the working time they wanted to provide. Just asking subjects to volunteer or offering them a certificate turned out to be significantly more motivating than mentioning that the regular conference fee would be waived for helpers. By means of an online-survey experiment, we find that intrinsic motivation to help is likely to have been crowded out by mentioning the waived fee. Increasing monetary incentives by varying hourly wages of 1, 5, and 10 Euros shows positive effects on the number of applications and on the working time offered. However, when comparing these results with treatments without any monetary compensation, the number of applications could not be increased by offering money and may even be reduced.

John A List, Anya Samek, Terri Zhu

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 67

We use a field experiment to investigate the effect of incentives on food purchase decisions at a grocery store. We recruit over 200 participants and track their purchases for a period of 6 months, permitting us a glimpse of more than 3,500 individual shopping trips. We randomize participants to one of several treatments, in which we incentivize fresh fruit and vegetable purchases, provide tips for fruit and vegetable preparation, or both. We report several key insights. First, our informational content treatment has little effect. Second, we find an important price effect: modest pecuniary incentives more than double the proportion of dollars spent on produce in the grocery store. Third, we find an interesting pattern of consumption after the experiment ends: even when incentives are removed, the treatment group has higher fruit and vegetable purchases compared to the control group. These long-term results are in stark contrast to either a standard price model or a behavioral model of 'crowd out.' Rather, our results are consonant with a habit formation model. This opens up the distinct possibility that short term incentives can be used as a key instrument to combat obesity.

Anne M Farrell, Susan D Krische, Karen L Sedatole

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 4

Complementing proprietary archival data with an experiment, we examine employees' subjective valuations of their employee stock options and explore a stock option education program as a mechanism for influencing those valuations. We argue that the conflicting evidence on employee subjective valuations in prior studies can be attributed in part to knowledge differences. Our archival and experimental results show most employees value their options lower than the corresponding Black-Scholes cost. We find that a stock option education program that provides descriptive information about the Black-Scholes option pricing model and quantitative information about option values using that model increases not only employees' subjective valuations but also their self-reported loyalty and motivation. We complement our primary results with analyses of the cross-sectional determinants of subjective valuations, the differential effects on valuations of different components of the education program, and the heuristics used to formulate subjective valuations.

Paul J Ferraro

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 54

Economic analyses of asymmetric information typically start with the assumption that individuals know more about their own characteristics than outside observers. This assumption implies that individuals can accurately assess their own competence in a given domain. However, individuals can only judge their competence if they are sufficiently competent. The relationship between competence and self-awareness explains a great deal of the overconfidence observed among economic agents. More specifically, overconfidence is inversely proportional to competence. Through a series of experiments and analyses of field data, the link between incompetence and overconfidence is confirmed and its implications for economic theory are explored.