Papers - All

Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna, Sendhil Mullainathan

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 14

We follow 822 applicants through the process of obtaining a driver's license in New Delhi, India. To understand how the bureaucracy responds to individual and social needs, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: bonus, lesson, and comparison groups. Participants in the bonus group were offered a financial reward if they could obtain their license fast; participants in the lesson group were offered free driving lessons. To gauge driving skills, we performed a surprise driving test after participants had obtained their licenses. Several interesting facts regarding corruption emerge. First, the bureaucracy responds to individual needs. Those who want their license faster (e.g. the bonus group), get it 40% faster and at a 20% higher rate. Second, the bureaucracy is insensitive to social needs. The bonus group does not learn to drive safely in order to obtain their license: in fact, 69% of them were rated as "failures" on the independent driving test. Those in the lesson group, despite superior driving skills, are only slightly more likely to obtain a license than the comparison group and far less likely (by 29 percentage points) than the bonus group. Detailed surveys allow us to document the mechanisms of corruption. We find that bureaucrats arbitrarily fail drivers at a high rate during the driving exam, irrespective of their ability to drive. To overcome this, individuals pay informal "agents" to bribe the bureaucrat and avoid taking the exam altogether. An audit study of agents further highlights the insensitivity of agents' pricing to driving skills. Together, these results suggest that bureaucrats raise red tape to extract bribes and that this corruption undermines the very purpose of regulation.

Joseph Henrich

Cited by*: 43 Downloads*: 24

No abstract available

Maya Haran Rosen , Orly Sade

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Define contribution mechanism combined with a dynamic job market can affect the sum of retirement savings and the choices of plans and products. Hence, it is important for regulators to engage servers to manage the accounts they accumulate over the years. In 2013-2014 the Israeli regulator reached out to the population, recommending the use of a website to help individuals find inactive retirement savings accounts and close them (withdraw the savings or transfer them to active accounts). The government's efforts did not result in the closure of most of the inactive accounts. Proprietary data indicate that those who closed the inactive accounts live in central locations with a higher socioeconomic index. Survey data indicate that those who lacked financial literacy and confidence in their financial knowledge were less likely to take financial actions. Using a controlled field experiment, we also provide evidence that an intervention with a human touch can promote greater involvement.

Stephan Meier

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 20

Framing a decision situation differently has affected behavior substantially in previous studies. This paper tests a framing effect in a field experiment at the University of Zurich. Each semester, every student has to decide whether to contribute to two social funds. Students were randomly informed that a high percentage of the student population contributed (or, equivalently, that a low percentage did not contribute), while others received the information that a relatively low percentage contributed (or a high percentage did not contribute). The results show the influence of framing effects is limited. People behave in a conditional cooperative way if informed either about the number of contributors or about the equivalent number of non-contributors. The positive correlation between group behavior and individual behavior is, however, weaker when the focus is on the defectors. The field experiment also shows gender differences in social comparison.

Bradley J Ruffle, Richard Sosis

Cited by*: 11 Downloads*: 8

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that either through selection or a causal relationship, the performance of religious rituals is associated with higher levels of cooperation. To test this hypothesis we design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kibbutzim, communal societies for which mutual cooperation is a matter of survival. Our results show that religious males (the primary practitioners of collective religious ritual in Orthodox Judaism) are more cooperative than religious females, secular males and secular females. Moreover, the frequency with which religious males engage in collective religious rituals predicts well their degree of cooperative behavior.

John A List

Cited by*: 262 Downloads*: 100

This study examines individual behavior in two well-functioning marketplaces to investigate whether market experience eliminates the endowment effect. Field evidence from both markets suggests that individual behavior converges to the neoclassical prediction as market experience increases. In an experimental test of whether these observations are due to treatment (market experience) or selection (e.g., static preferences), I find that market experience plays a significant role in eliminating the endowment effect. I also find that these results are robust to institutional change and extend beyond the two marketplaces studied. Overall, this study provides strong evidence that market experience eliminates an important market anomaly.

John A List

Cited by*: 16 Downloads*: 22

A vibrant literature has emerged that suggests willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures of value are quite different for inexperienced consumers but that value differences erode with market experience. One potential shortcoming of this literature is that market experience is endogenous. This study presents a framed field experiment that exogenously induces market experience. Empirical findings support the premise that market experience, alone, can eliminate an important market anomaly.

Dean S Karlan, John A List

Cited by*: 37 Downloads*: 17

We conducted a natural field experiment to explore the effect of price changes on charitable contributions. To operationalize our tests, we examine whether an offer to match contributions to a non-profit organization changes the likelihood and amount that an individual donates. Direct mail solicitations were sent to over 50,000 prior donors. We find that the match offer increases both the revenue per solicitation and the probability that an individual donates. While comparisons of the match treatments and the control group consistently reveal this pattern, larger match ratios (i.e., $3:$1 and $2:$1) relative to smaller match ratios ($1:$1) had no additional impact. The results have clear implications for practitioners in the design of fundraising campaigns and provide avenues for future empirical and theoretical work on charitable giving. Further, the data provide an interesting test of important methods used in cost-benefit analysis.

Eszter Czibor, Sander Onderstal, Randolph Sloof, Mirjam van Praag

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 76

We conduct a framed field experiment in a Dutch university to compare student effort provision and exam performance under the two most prevalent evaluation practices: absolute (criterion-referenced) and relative (norm-referenced) grading. Based on the empirical stylized fact of gender differences in competitiveness we hypothesize that the rank-order tournament created by relative grading will increase male, but not female, performance. Contrary to our expectations, we find no impact of competitive grading on preparation behavior or exam scores among either gender. Our result may be attributed to the low value students in our sample attach to academic excellence.

Amanda Bayer, Syon Bhanot, Fernando Lozano

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

No abstract available

Gad Allon, Jan A. Van Mieghem, Dennis J. Zhang

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 71

This paper studies how service providers can design social interaction among participants and quantify the causal impact of that interaction on service quality. We focus on education and analyze whether encouraging social interaction among students improves learning outcomes in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which are a new service delivery channel with universal access at reduced, if not zero, cost. We analyze three randomized experiments in a MOOC with more than 30; 317 students from 183 countries. Two experiments study large-group interaction by encouraging a random subset of students to visit the course discussion board. The majority of students treated in these experiments had higher social engagement, higher quiz completion rates, and higher course grades. Using these treatments as instrumental variables, we estimate that one additional board visit causally increases the probability that a student finishes the quiz in the subsequent week by up to 4:3%. The third experiment studies small-group interaction by encouraging a random subset of students to conduct one-on-one synchronous discussions. Students who followed through and actually conducted pairwise discussions increased their quiz completion rates and quiz scores by 10% in the subsequent week. Combining results from these three experiments, we provide recommendations for designing social interaction mechanisms to improve service quality.

Gert-Jan Romensen, Adriaan R Soetevent

Cited by*: Downloads*:

An often-voiced concern with relative performance feedback is that it may not improve workplace productivity if workers become demotivated and see no way to improve. Targeting feedback at specific productivity measures over which workers have direct control may in such cases prevent demotivation and focus attention. Does targeting improve worker productivity? We partner with a large bus company and experimentally vary the nature and number of peer-comparison messages which 409 bus drivers receive in their monthly feedback report. Messages are targeted at concrete driving behaviors and aimed at improving comfort and fuel efficiency. Using over 800,000 trip-level observations, we find that these targeted peer-comparison messages do not improve aggregate (fuel economy) or disaggregate measures (such as acceleration) of driving behavior. Further analyses also reveal no temporal or heterogeneous effects of the targeted messages.

Daniel Bergan, Alan S Gerber, Dean S Karlan

Cited by*: 36 Downloads*: 27

We conducted a field experiment to measure the effect of exposure to newspapers on political behavior and opinion. Before the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, we randomly assigned individuals to a Washington Post free subscription treatment, a Washington Times free subscription treatment, or a control treatment. We find no effect of either paper on political knowledge, stated opinions, or turnout in post-election survey and voter data. However, receiving either paper led to more support for the Democratic candidate, suggesting that media slant mattered less in this case than media exposure. Some evidence from voting records also suggests that receiving either paper led to increased 2006 voter turnout.

Chris Arnot, Peter C Boxall, Sean B Cash

Cited by*: 43 Downloads*: 54

The existing literature on socially responsible purchasing relies heavily on stated preference measures elicited through surveys that utilize hypothetical market choices. This paper explores consumers' revealed purchasing behavior with regard to fair trade coffee and is apparently the first to do so in an actual market setting. In a series of experiments, we investigated differences in consumer responsiveness to relative price changes in fair trade and non-fair trade brewed coffees. In order to minimize the hypothetical bias that may be present in some experimental settings, we conducted our experiments in cooperation with a vendor who allowed us to vary prices in an actual coffee shop. Using a choice model, we found that purchasers of fair trade coffee were much less price responsive than those of other coffee products. The demonstration of low sensitivity to price suggests that the market premiums identified by stated preference studies do indeed exist and are not merely artifacts of hypothetical settings.

John A List

Cited by*: 117 Downloads*: 34

No abstract available

Amanda Chuan, John A List, Anya Samek

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Research has shown that giving disadvantaged families financial incentives to invest in their children could decrease socioeconomic inequality by enhancing human capital formation. Yet, within the household how are such gains achieved? We use a field experiment to investigate how parents allocate time when they receive financial incentives. We find that incentives increase investment in the target child. But, parents achieve these gains by substituting away from time spent with the child's sibling(s). An unintended consequence is that intrahousehold inequality increases and aggregate gains from the program are overstated when focusing only on target children.

John A List, Jeffrey A Livingston, Susanne Neckermann

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

In the face of worryingly low performance on standardized test, offering students financial incentives linked to academic performance has been proposed as a potentially cost-effective way to support improvement. However, a large literature across disciplines finds that extrinsic incentives, once removed, may crowd out intrinsic motivation on subsequent, similar tasks. We conduct a field experiment where students, parents, and tutors are offered incentives designed to encourage student preparation for a high-stakes state test. The incentives reward performance on a separate low-stakes assessment designed to measure the same skills as the high-stakes test. Performance on the high-stakes test, however, is not incentivized. We find substantial treatment effects on the incented tests but no effect on the non-incented test; if anything, the incentives result in worse performance on the non-incented test. We also find evidence supporting the conclusion that the incentives crowd out intrinsic motivation to perform well on the non-incented test, but this effect is only temporary. One year later, students who had been in the incentives treatments perform better than those in the control on the same non-incented test.

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.

Amanda Kowalski

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 6

I examine treatment effect heterogeneity within an experiment to inform external validity. The local average treatment effect (LATE) gives an average treatment effect for compliers. I bound and estimate average treatment effects for always takers and never takers by extending marginal treatment effect methods. I use these methods to separate selection from treatment effect heterogeneity, generalizing the comparison of OLS to LATE. Applying these methods to the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, I find that the treatment effect of insurance on emergency room utilization decreases from always takers to compliers to never takers. Previous utilization explains a large share of the treatment effect heterogeneity. Extrapolations show that other expansions could increase or decrease utilization.

Michael J. Seiler

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

We test the disjunctive hypothesis as it relates to mortgage contracts and find that a liquidated damages clause shifts one's view of a mortgage from a promise to perform to either a promise to perform or pay compensatory damages. However, when a strategic mortgage default is responsible for the breach, the perceived immorality of this action overwhelms the liquidated damages clause effect in support of the disjunctive thesis. We also find that people's conscious "experimentally stated preference" moral stance on installment loan (mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt and even cell phone contracts) default significantly differs from their subconscious "experimentally revealed preference" moral stance indicating a difference between what people say they believe and what they actually believe.