Papers - Framed

Kentaro Asai, Seda Ertac, Ali Hortacsu, John A List, Howard Nusbaum, Lester Tong, Karen Ye

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People often demand a greater price when selling goods that they own than they would pay to purchase the same goods- a well-known economic bias called the endowment effect. The endowment effect has been found to be muted among experienced traders, but little is known about how trading experience reduces the endowment effect. We show that when selling, experienced traders exhibit lower right anterior insula activity, but no differences in nucleus accumbens or orbitofrontal activation, compared with inexperienced traders. Furthermore, insula activation mediates the effect of experience on the endowment effect. Similar results are obtained for inexperienced traders who are incentivized to gain trading experience. This finding indicates that frequent trading likely mitigates the endowment effect indirectly by modifying negative affective responses in the context of selling.

Matthew A. Kraft, John A List, Jeffrey A Livingston, Sally Sadoff

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In-person tutoring programs can have large impacts on K-12 student achievement, but high program costs and limited local supply of tutors have hampered scale-up. Online tutoring provided by volunteers can potentially reach more students in need. We implemented a randomized pilot program of online tutoring that paired college volunteers with middle school students. We estimate consistently positive but statistically insignificant effects on student achievement, 0.07s for math and 0.04s for reading. While our estimated effects are smaller than those for many higher-dosage in-person programs, they are from a significantly lower-cost program delivered within the challenging context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

Rocco Caferra, Roberto Dell'Anno, Andrea Morone

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This paper aims to unmask the inadequacy of the review process of a sample of fee-charging journals in economics. We submitted a bait-manuscript to 104 academic economic journals to test whether there is a difference in the peer-review process between Article Processing Charges (APC) journals and Traditional journals which do not require a publication fee. The submitted bait-article was based on completely made-up data, with evident errors in terms of methodology, literature, reporting of results, and quality of language. Nevertheless, about half of the APC journals fell in the trap. Their editors accepted the article in the journals and required to pay the publication fee. We conclude that the Traditional model has a more effective incentive-mechanism in selecting articles, based on quality standards. Otherwise, we confirm that the so-called "Predatory Journals" - i.e. academic journals which accept papers without a quality check - exploit the APC scheme to increase their profits. They are also able to enter whitelists (e.g. Scopus, COPE). Accordingly, poor-quality articles published on APC journals shed the lights on the weakness of methodologies based on a mechanical inclusion of academic journals in scientific database indexes, succeeding in being considered for bibliometric evaluations of research institutions or scholars' productivity.

John A List

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In 2019 I put together a summary of data from my field experiments website that pertained to framed field experiments. Several people have asked me if I have update. In this document I update all figures and numbers to show the details for 2021. I also include the description from the 2019 paper below.

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

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Policymakers are increasingly turning to insights gained from the experimental method as a means of informing public policies. Whether-and to what extent-insights from a research study scale to the level of the broader public is, in many situations, based on blind faith. This scale-up problem can lead to a vast waste of resources, a missed opportunity to improve people's lives, and a diminution in the public's trust in the scientific method's ability to contribute to policymaking. This study provides a theoretical lens to deepen our understanding of the science of how to use science. Through a simple model, we highlight three elements of the scale-up problem: (1) when does evidence become actionable (appropriate statistical inference); (2) properties of the population; and (3) properties of the situation. We argue that until these three areas are fully understood and recognized by researchers and policymakers, the threats to scalability will render any scaling exercise as particularly vulnerable. In this way, our work represents a challenge to empiricists to estimate the nature and extent of how important the various threats to scalability are in practice, and to implement those in their original research.

Greg Allenby, Russell Belk, Catherine Eckel, Robert Fisher, Ernan Haruvy, John A List, Yu Ma, Peter Popkowski Leszczyc, Yu Wang, Sherry Xin Li

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We offer a unified conceptual, behavioral, and econometric framework for optimal fundraising that deals with both synergies and discrepancies between approaches from economics, consumer behavior, and sociology. The purpose is to offer a framework that can bridge differences and open a dialogue between disciplines in order to facilitate optimal fundraising design. The literature is extensive, and our purpose is to offer a brief background and perspective on each of the approaches, provide an integrated framework leading to new insights, and discuss areas of future research.

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.

Christopher Cotton, Brent R Hickman, John A List, Joseph Price, Sutanuka Roy

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We conduct a field experiment across three diverse school districts to structurally identify student motivation and study productivity parameters in a model of adolescent human capital development. By observing study time, homework task completion, and test results, we can identify individual and demographic variations in motivation and study time effectiveness. Struggling students typically do not lack motivation but rather struggle to convert study time into completed assignments and proficiency improvements. The study also attending a higher-performing school is associated with both higher productivity and higher motivation relative to peers with similar observables in lower-performing schools. Counterfactual analyses estimates that school quality differences account for a substantial share of the racial differences in test scores, and considers the impact of alternative policies aimed at reducing racial performance gaps.

Michal Krawczyk

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Several studies have identified the "better than average" effect - the tendency of most people to think they are better than most other people on most dimensions. The effect would have profound consequences (see e.g. Barber and Odean (2001)). These findings are predominantly based on non-incentivized, non-verifiable self-reports. The current study looks at the impact of incentives to judge one's abilities accurately in a framed field experiment. Nearly 400 students were asked to predict whether they would do better or worse than average in an exam. The most important findings are that subjects tend to show more confidence when incentivized and when asked before the exam rather than afterwards. The first effect shows particularly in females.