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Kosuke Imai
Cited by*: 12 Downloads*: 9 
In their landmark study of a field experiment, Gerber and Green (2000) found that get-out-the-vote calls reduce turnout by five percentage points. In this article, I introduce statistical methods that can uncover discrepancies between experimental design and actual implementation. The application of this methodology shows that Gerber and Green's negative finding is caused by inadvertent deviations from their stated experimental protocol. The initial discovery led to revisions of the original data by the authors and retraction of the numerical results in their article. Analysis of their revised data, however, reveals new systematic patterns of implementation errors. Indeed, treatment assignments of the revised data appear to be even less randomized than before their corrections. To adjust for these problems, I employ a more appropriate statistical method and demonstrate that telephone canvassing increases turnout by five percentage points. This article demonstrates how statistical methods can find and correct complications of field experiments.
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.
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