John A List
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Last year I put together a summary of data from my field experiments website that pertained to natural field experiments. Several people have asked me if I have an update. In this document I update all figures and numbers to show the details for 2020. I also include the description from the 2019 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. Several people have asked me if I have an 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.
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. Several people have asked me if I have an update. In this document I update all figures and numbers to show the details for 2022. I also include the description from the 2019 paper below.
John A List, Charles Bailey, Patricia Euzent , Thomas Martin
Cited by*: 10 Downloads*: 42

This article measures the degree to which academic economists have engaged in unethical behavior and the degree to which academic economists believe the profession as a whole engages in unethical behavior. Three main types of unethical behavior are examined: (1) falsification of research; (2) expropriation of graduate student research or including an undeserving co-author on a research paper; and(3) exchange of grades for gifts, money, or sex. Using a unique data set gathered at the 1998 American Economic Association (AEA) meetings, we find that there is a significant amount of misconduct, particularly in the second category.
Joshua D Angrist, Victor Lavy
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In Israel, as in many other countries, a high school matriculation certificate is required by universities and some jobs. In spite of the certificate's value, Israeli society is marked by vast differences in matriculation rates by region and socioeconomic status. We attempted to increase the likelihood of matriculation among low-achieving students by offering substantial cash incentives in two demonstration programs. As a theoretical matter, cash incentives may be helpful if low-achieving students reduce investment in schooling because of high discount rates, part-time work, or face peer pressure not to study. A small pilot program selected individual students within schools for treatment, with treatment status determined by previous test scores and a partially randomized cutoff for low socioeconomic status. In a larger follow-up program, entire schools were randomly selected for treatment and the program operated with the cooperation of principals and teachers. The results suggest the Achievement Awards program that randomized treatment at the school level raised matriculation rates, while the student-based program did not.
Lorenz Goette, Alois Stutzer, Michael Zehnder
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In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individually asked to either actively consent or dissent to some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that confronting individuals with the choice of engaging in a specific pro-social behavior contributes to the formation of issue-specific altruistic preferences while simultaneously involving a commitment. The hypothesis is tested in a large-scale field experiment on blood donation. We find that this "active-decision" intervention substantially increases the stated willingness to donate blood, as well as the actual donation behavior of people who have not fully formed preferences beforehand.
Luis Cabral, Lingfang Li
Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 41

We run a series of controlled field experiments on eBay where buyers are re-warded for providing feedback. Our results provide little support for the hypothesis of buyer's rational economic behavior: the likelihood of feedback barely increases as we increase feedback rebate values; also, the speed of feedback, bid levels and the number of bids are all insensitive to rebate values. By contrast, we find evidence consistent with reciprocal buyer behavior. Lower trans-action quality leads to a higher probability of negative feedback as well as a speeding up of such negative feedback. However, when transaction quality is low (as measured by slow shipping), offering a rebate significantly decreases the likelihood of negative feedback. All in all, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that buyers reciprocate the seller's "good deeds" (feedback rebate, high transaction quality) with more frequent and more favorable feedback. As a result, sellers can "buy" feedback, but such feedback is likely to be biased.
John A List, Anya Samek
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Almost a third of US children ages 2-19 are deemed overweight or obese, and part of the problem is the habitual decision to consume high calorie, low nutrient foods. We propose that the school lunchroom provides a 'teachable moment' to engage children in making healthful choices. We conduct a field experiment with over 1,500 participants in grades K-8 and evaluate the impact of small non-monetary incentives on the selection of milk in the school lunchroom. At baseline, only 16% of children select white milk relative to 84% choosing chocolate milk. We find a significant effect of incentives, which increase white milk selection by 2.5 times, to 40%. One concern with incentives is that they may decrease intrinsic motivation to eat healthy, called 'crowd-out of intrinsic motivation.' However, we do not find evidence of 'crowd-out'; rather, we see some suggestive evidence of the positive habit forming effect of incentives.
Uri Gneezy, Aldo Rustichini
Cited by*: 287 Downloads*: 81

The deterrence hypothesis predicts that the introduction of a penalty that leaves everything else unchanged will reduce the occurrence of the behavior subject to the fine. We present the result of a field study in a group of day-care centers that contradicts this prediction. Parents used to arrive late to collect their children, forcing a teacher to stay after closing time. We introduced a monetary fine for late-coming parents. As a result, the number of late-coming parents increased significantly. After the fine was removed no reduction occurred. We argue that penalties are usually introduced into an incomplete contract, social or private. They may change the information that agents have, and therefore the effect on behavior may be opposite of that expected. If this is true, the deterrence hypothesis loses its predictive strength, since the clause "everything else is left unchanged" might be hard to satisfy.
Andreas Lange, John A List, Michael K Price
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The tontine, which is an interesting mixture of group annuity, group life insurance, and lottery, has a peculiar place in economic history. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it played a major role in raising funds to finance public goods in Europe, but today it is rarely encountered outside of a dusty footnote in actuarial course notes or as a means to thicken the plot of a murder mystery. This study provides a formal model of individual contribution decisions under a modern variant of the historical tontine mechanism that is easily implemented by private charities. Our model incorporates desirable properties of the historical tontine to develop a mechanism to fund the private provision of a public good. The tontine-like mechanism we derive is predicted to outperform not only the voluntary contribution mechanism but also another widely used mechanism: charitable lotteries. Our experimental test of the instrument provides some evidence of the beneficial effects associated with implementing tontine-like schemes. We find that the mechanism has particular power in cases where agents are risk-averse or in situations where substantial asymmetries characterize individual preferences for the public good.