Papers - All

David H Herberich, John A List

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 42

The article reports on a study that provides understanding of how risk preferences and other factors influence a farmer's decision to participate in a carbon offset market. It states incorporating background risk in a laboratory setting and drawing subjects from both a standard student population and a nonstandard farmer population helped to understand the decision making process. The study suggests that farmers are slightly more risk averse than students.

Loukas Balafoutas, Nikos Nikiforakis, Bettina Rockenbach

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: None

Many interactions in modern human societies are among strangers. Explaining cooperation in such interactions is challenging. The two most prominent explanations critically depend on individuals' willingness to punish defectors: In models of direct punishment, individuals punish antisocial behavior at a personal cost, whereas in models of indirect reciprocity, they punish indirectly by withholding rewards. We investigate these competing explanations in a field experiment with real-life interactions among strangers. We find clear evidence of both direct and indirect punishment. Direct punishment is not rewarded by strangers and, in line with models of indirect reciprocity, is crowded out by indirect punishment opportunities. The existence of direct and indirect punishment in daily life indicates the importance of both means of understanding the evolution of cooperation.

Luca Fumarco

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 28

In this study, I show that with the appropriate experimental strategy, a correspondence test can be adapted to investigate disability discrimination in the rental housing market. I focus on discrimination against blind tenants assisted by guide dogs in Italy and obtain very robust results. The utilization of three fictitious household tenants (that is, a married couple, a married couple with a blind wife who owns a guide dog, and a married couple where the wife is normal sighted and owns a pet dog) allows me to investigate whether discrimination is due to the blindness or to guide dog alone. I find that apartment owners discriminate blind tenants because of the presence of the guide dog alone. According to the Italian law, this is indirect discrimination, which in the US corresponds to the refusal to provide reasonable accommodation.

Annika List, John A List, Anya Samek

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Social scientists for years have documented the pervasiveness of discrimination in product and labor markets. While the literature has recently attempted to measure the nature of such discrimination, much less work has been done exploring the origins of discrimination. We make a modest step in this direction by reporting data from a field experiment attempting to measure discrimination amongst 3-5 years olds. Using a design that isolated discriminatory behaviors in economic games, we find that both White and Hispanic children send more resources to Black children than White children, whereas black children send equal amounts. This provides a first glimpse that suggests preferences amongst the young do not show similar patterns as preferences of adults.

Sandra Polania-Reyes

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 52

Although social capital has been considered of the utmost importance for development it remains a complex and elusive concept. Different dimensions of social capital form part of the puzzle: cooperation is an individual other-regarding preference; social norms stem from beliefs about others' behavior; and the formation of such beliefs is mediated by attributes of the social network. To disentangle social capital we conduct an artefactual field experiment with 714 households at the inset of a Conditional Cash Transfer program in an urban context. To our knowledge this is the first paper that disentangles cooperation from coordination by conducting a minimum effort coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria. Willingness to cooperate is teased out using a public goods game. By controlling for the density of network information we capture the role of connections, which is the third element of the mixture. We also look at the relation between our experimental data and traditional survey measures of social capital. Our identification strategy allows us to assess whether exposure to the program could be helping individuals overcome strategic uncertainty and select the most efficient equilibrium in the coordination game. The regressions suggest that the program helps overcome the coordination failure through different channels. In particular, the evidence suggests there is a spillover effect of the monetary incentive as it facilitates a social norm, which itself allows individuals to overcome the coordination failure. We rule out confounding factors such as individual socio-economic characteristics, social capital accumulation, willingness to cooperate and connectivity.

Mirco Tonin, Michael Vlassopoulos

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 18

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers' pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: action-oriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. To this end we employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces action-oriented altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find that action-oriented altruism accounts for a significant increase in effort, while there is no additional impact due to output-oriented altruism. We also find significant gender-related differences in the treatment effect: women are very responsive to the treatment condition eliciting action-oriented altruism, while men's behavior is not affected by any of the treatments.

Daniel Houser, John A List, Marco Piovesan, Anya Samek, Joachim Winter

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 88

Acts of dishonesty permeate life. Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economics approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different contexts. We conduct an experiment that includes both parents and their young children as subjects, exploring the roles of moral cost and scrutiny on dishonest behavior. We find that the highest level of dishonesty occurs in settings where the parent acts alone and the dishonest act benefits the child. In this spirit, there is also an interesting, quite different, effect of children on parents' behavior: parents act more honestly under the scrutiny of daughters than under the scrutiny of sons. This finding sheds new light on the origins of the widely documented gender differences in cheating behavior observed among adults, where a typical result is that females are more honest than males.

Matthew McCarter, Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 2

The current social dilemma literature lacks theoretical consensus regarding how individuals behave when facing multiple simultaneous social dilemmas. The divided-loyalty hypothesis, from organizational theory, predicts that cooperation will decline as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. The conditional-cooperation hypothesis, from behavioral economics, predicts that cooperation will increase as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. We employ a laboratory experiment to create consensus between these literatures and find support for the conditional-cooperation hypothesis. The positive effect of interacting with different group members comes from participants having an opportunity to shift their cooperative behavior from the less cooperative to the more cooperative group.

Matthew McCarter, Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 5

It is common in organizational life to be simultaneously involved in multiple collective actions. These collective actions may be modeled using public good dilemmas. The developing social dilemma literature has two perspectives - the "divided loyalties" and "conditional cooperation" perspectives - that give opposite predictions about how individuals will behave when they simultaneously play two identical public good games. The current paper creates consensus between these social dilemma perspectives by examining cooperative behavior of participants interacting in two public good games with either different or the same group members. In each round, individuals have a common budget constraint across the two games. In support of the conditional cooperator's perspective of social dilemmas, we find that playing two games with different, rather than same, group members increases overall contributions. Over the course of the experiment, participants playing two games with different group members shift their contributions significantly more often toward more cooperative public good games than participants playing with the same group members.

Ginger Z Jin, Andrew Kato

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 18

Every new method of trade offers an opportunity for economic agents to compare its costs and benefits relative to the status quo. Such comparison motivates sorting across market segments and reshapes the whole marketplace. The Internet provides an excellent example: it introduces substantial search cost savings over brick and mortar retail stores but imposes new obstacles for sellers to convey quality. Using sports card trading as a case study, we provide empirical evidence on (1) the sorting of product quality between the online and offline segments, (2) the changes for retail outlets after the Internet came into place, and (3) how supporting industries such as professional grading and card manufacturing adapted to take advantage of the new market.

Charles Godward , John A List, Mark Thompson

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 4

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Christopher Mann

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 5

The survey methodology literature has debated whether advance letters to potential survey respondents will reduce nonresponse bias and thereby improve the accuracy of preelection forecasts. This research note analyzes the results of experiments conducted in Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania in which advance letters were sent to a random sample of potential survey respondents to 2002 preelection surveys. We find a significant increase in the overall response rate, although notably less than in past studies. However, the advance letters did not improve the representativeness of survey respondents or the accuracy of the election forecasts.

Alexander G James, John A List, James J Murphy, Michael K Price

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

We partnered with Alaska's Pick.Click.Give. Charitable Contributions Program to implement a statewide natural field experiment with 540,000 Alaskans designed to explore whether targeted appeals emphasizing donor benefits through warm glow impact donations. Results highlight the relative import of appeals to self. Individuals who received such an appeal were 4.5 percent more likely to give and gave 20 percent more than counterparts in the control group. Yet, a message that instead appealed to recipient benefits had no effect on average donations relative to the control group. We also find evidence of long-run effects of warm glow appeals in the subsequent year.

Michael J. Seiler

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 1

In this study, I examine relative private signal strength and find that offered advice is significantly more influential in changing strategic mortgage default proclivity than is observed actions. Moreover, these private signals are more reflective of financial herding than they are of an information cascade. From a policy perspective, herds are easier to reverse than are cascades making more effective policies aimed at curbing the incidence of strategic mortgage default. Interestingly, an informationally equivalent change in private signal strength across actions and advice alters strategic default willingness, but not the moral stance of borrowers, which demonstrates the complexity of this life-altering financially and emotionally impactful decision.

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.

Erwin Bulte, Aart de Zeeuw, Shelby Gerking, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 8

Measuring preferences via stated methods remains the only technique to obtain the total economic value of a non-marketed good or service. This study examines if alternative causes of an environmental problem affect individual statements of compensation demanded. Making use of a unique sample drawn from the Netherlands, we find that Hicksian equivalent surplus (ES) is not significantly affected by causes of environmental harm. While our finding that agents only care about outcomes, rather than causes, is consonant with standard applications of utility theory, it is at odds with some recent experimental findings measuring the effects of cause on Hicksian compensating surplus (CS).

Jeffrey A Flory, Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 12 Downloads*: 3

Recently an important line of research using laboratory experiments has provided a new potential reason for why we observe gender imbalances in labor markets: men are more competitively inclined than women. Whether, and to what extent, such preferences yield differences in naturally-occurring labor market outcomes remains an open issue. We address this question by exploring job-entry decisions in a natural field experiment where we randomized nearly 7,000 interested job-seekers into different compensation regimes. By varying the role that individual competition plays in setting the wage, we are able to explore whether competition, by itself, can cause differential job entry. The data highlight the power of the compensation regime in that women disproportionately shy away from competitive work settings. Yet, there are important factors that attenuate the gender differences, including whether the job is performed in teams, whether the job task is female-oriented, and the local labor market.

Alison Booth, Andrew Leigh

Cited by*: 23 Downloads*: 19

We test for gender discrimination by sending fake CVs to apply for entry-level jobs. Female candidates are more likely to receive a callback, with the difference being largest in occupations that are more female-dominated.

Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Labor force composition and the allocation of talent remain of vital import to modern economies. For their part, governments and companies around the globe have implemented equal employment opportunity (EEO) regulations to influence labor market flows. Even though such regulations are pervasive, surprisingly little is known about their impacts. We use a natural field experiment conducted across 10 U.S. cities to investigate if EEO statements in job advertisements affect the first step in the employment process, application rates. Making use of data from nearly 2,500 job seekers, we find considerable policy effects, but in an unexpected direction: the presence of an EEO statement dampens rather than encourages racial minorities willingness to apply for jobs. Importantly, the effects are particularly pronounced for educated job seekers and in cities with white majority populations. Complementary survey evidence suggests the underlying mechanism at work is "tokenism", revealing that EEO statements backfire because racial minorities avoid environments in which they are perceived as regulatory, or symbolic, hires rather than being hired on their own merits. Beyond their practical and theoretical importance, our results highlight how field experiments can significantly improve policy making. In this case, if one goal of EEO regulations is to enhance the pool of minority applicants, then it is not working.

Alan S Gerber

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 10

This article reports the results of several field experiments designed to measure campaign effects in partisan contests. The findings suggest incumbent campaigns failed to increase incumbent vote share, whereas the challenger campaign was effective. To understand these and other results, the incumbent's optimal spending strategy was analyzed theoretically. The analysis reveals that if incumbents maximize their probability of victory rather than vote share, campaigns by typical incumbents are expected to produce only minimal improvement in incumbent vote share. The analysis also explains how returns to campaign spending vary with the competitiveness of the election, how incumbent spending can improve the incumbent's probability of victory yet have only minimal effect on incumbent vote share, and why rational spending plans might decrease the sponsor's expected vote. This article demonstrates the wide scope of application for field experiments and provides an example of how experimental findings can serve as a catalyst for generating theories.