Papers - All

Richard Martin, John Randal

Cited by*: 20 Downloads*: 32

No abstract available

Alan S Gerber, Donald P Green, Ron Shachar

Cited by*: 39 Downloads*: 19

Habit is a frequently mentioned but understudied cause of political action. This article provides the first direct test of the hypothesis that casting a ballot in one election increases one's propensity to go to the polls in the future. A field experiment involving 25,200 registered voters was conducted prior to the November general election of 1998. Subjects were randomly assigned to treatment conditions in which they were urged to vote through direct mail or face-to-face canvassing. Compared to a control group that received no contact, the treatment groups were significantly more likely to vote in 1998. The treatment groups were also significantly more likely to vote in local elections held in November of 1999. After deriving a statistical estimator to isolate the effect of habit, we find that, ceteris paribus, voting in one election substantially increases the likelihood of voting in the future. Indeed, the influence of past voting exceeds the effects of age and education reported in previous studies.

Stefano DellaVigna, John A List, Ulrike Malmendier, Gautam Rao

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 61

Why do people vote? We design a field experiment to estimate a model of voting 'because others will ask'. The expectation of being asked motivates turnout if individuals derive pride from telling others that they voted, or feel shame from admitting that they did not vote, provided that lying is costly. In a door-to-door survey about election turnout, we experimentally vary (i) the informational content and use of a flyer pre-announcing the survey, (ii) the duration and payment for the survey, and (iii) the incentives to lie about past voting. The experimental results indicate significant social image concerns. For the 2010 Congressional election, we estimate a value of voting 'to tell others' of about $15, contributing 2 percentage points to turnout. Lastly, we evaluate a get-out-the-vote intervention in which we tell potential voters that we will ask if they voted.

Joshua D Angrist, Eric Bettinger, Erik Bloom, Elizabeth King, Michael Kremer

Cited by*: 124 Downloads*: 50

Colombia's PACES program provided over 125,000 pupils from poor neighborhoods with vouchers that covered approximately half the cost of private secondary school. Since many vouchers were allocated by lottery, we use differences in outcomes between lottery winners and losers to assess program effects. Three years into the program, lottery winners were 15 percentage points more likely to have attended private school, had completed .1 more years of schooling, and were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished 8 th grade, primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades. The program did not significantly affect dropout rates. Lottery winners scored .2 standard deviations higher on standardized tests. There is some evidence that winners worked less than losers and were less likely to marry or cohabit as teenagers. On average, lottery winners increased their educational expenditure by about 70% of the value of the voucher. Since winners also worked less, they devoted more total resources to education. Compared to an equivalent expansion of the public education system, the voucher program increased annual government educational expenditure by about $24 per winner. But the costs to the government and to participants were probably much less than the increase in winners' earnings due to greater educational attainment.

Jeffrey A Flory, Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 85

Workplace misbehaviors are often governed by explicit monitoring and strict punishment. Such enforcement activities can serve to lessen worker productivity and harm worker morale. We take a different approach to curbing worker misbehavior-bonuses. Examining more than 6500 donor phone calls across more than 80 workers, we use a natural field experiment to investigate how different wage contracts influence workers' propensity to break workplace rules in harmful ways. Our findings show that even though standard relative performance pay contracts, relative to a fixed wage scheme, increase productivity, they have a dark side: they cause considerable cheating and sabotage of co-workers. Yet, even in such environments, by including an unexpected bonus, the employer can substantially curb worker misbehavior. In this manner, our findings reveal how employers can effectively leverage bonuses to eliminate undesired behaviors induced by performance pay contracts.

Daniel Jones, Sera Linardi

Cited by*: 16 Downloads*: 19

An extensive literature on reputation signaling in prosocial settings has focused on an intrinsic desire for positive reputation. In our paper, we provide experimental evidence that some individuals are averse to both positive and negative reputation and will therefore respond to visibility by signaling that they are an "average altruism type" relative to their audience. We formalize our hypotheses about "wallflower" behavior in a theoretical model. Our experimental results show that instead of uniformly increasing contributions, visibility draws contributions towards the middle of others' contributions. As a result, visibility is associated with higher levels of giving only when in scenarios where others are giving a large amount. We also observe heterogeneity in reputation concerns wallflower behavior is particularly strong for women and can be observed in several different settings.

Abhijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, Esther Duflo

Cited by*: 28 Downloads*: 482

What are the determinants of the health and of well-being? Income and wealth are clearly part of the story, but does access to health-care have a large independent effect, as the advocates of more investment in health-care, such as the World Health Organization's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (2001)), have argued? This paper reports on a recent survey in a poor rural area of the state of Rajasthan in India intended to shed some light on this issue, where there was an attempt to use a set of interlocking surveys to collect data on health and economic status, as well as the public and private provision of health care.

Rachel Croson, Americus Reed, Jen Shang

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 54

Information is presented about a presentation at the Advances in Consumer Research North American Conference on social information and marketing environments in donation behavior. Topics in the presentation include activated identities in decision-making, contextual cues in donation behavior, and gender identity in informers and targets of social information. Field experiments on radio pledges are also described.

William Masters, Diakalia Sanogo

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 9

In low-income countries, malnutrition is often most sever among infants of six to twenty-four months. They need higher-density foods than the family diet, but density is a credence attribute. We hypothesize that the premium now paid for heavily advertised brands reflects demand for quality assurance, which could be provided at lower cost to competing firms through third-party certification. We use a new market experiment to find that mothers' average willingness-to-pay for certification is about $1.75/kg, for four times its cost, so that total economic-surplus gains from introducing certification to Mali would be on the order of $1 million annually.

Michal Krawczyk

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

This paper reports a field experiment involving manipulation of invitations to register in an experimental economics subject database. Two types of invitations were sent out: one emphasizing pecuniary and the other non-pecuniary benefits of participation. The former resulted in higher response rate and the strength of this treatment effect was comparable in different groups defined by gender and academic major. In a follow-up test conducted about a year later it was found that individuals recruited by invitations emphasizing monetary benefits were less willing to make an effort to participate in a non-paid survey. The very same survey also showed that they were marginally less altruistic in general.

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

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 87

No abstract available

Christina M Fong, Erzo FP Luttmer

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 4

We investigate determinants of private and public generosity to Katrina victims using an artifactual field experiment. In this experiment, respondents from the general population viewed a short audiovisual presentation that manipulated respondents' perceptions of the income, race, and deservingness of Katrina victims in one of two small cities. Respondents then decided how to split $100 between themselves and a charity helping Katrina victims in this small city. We also collected survey data on subjective support for government spending to help the Katrina victims in the cities. We find, first, that our income manipulation had a significant effect on giving; respondents gave more when they perceived the victims to be poorer. Second, the race and deservingness manipulations had virtually no effect on average giving. Third, the averages mask substantial racial bias among sub-groups of our sample. For instance, the subgroup of whites who identify with their ethnic or racial group strongly biased their giving against blacks. Finally, subjective support for government spending to help Katrina victims was significantly influenced by both our race and deservingness manipulations, but not by the income manipulation. White respondents supported significantly less public spending for black victims and significantly more for victims who were described in more flattering terms, such as being helpful and law-abiding.

Steven D Levitt, John A List

Cited by*: 321 Downloads*: 96

A critical question facing experimental economists is whether behavior inside the laboratory is a good indicator of behavior outside the laboratory. To address that question, we build a model in which the choices that individuals make depend not just on financial implications, but also on the nature and extent of scrutiny by others, the particular context in which a decision is embedded, and the manner in which participants and tasks are selected. We present empirical evidence demonstrating the importance of these various factors. To the extent that lab and naturally occurring environments systematically differ on any of these dimensions, the results obtained inside and outside the lab need not correspond. Focusing on experiments designed to measure social preferences, we discuss the extent to which the existing laboratory results generalize to naturally-occurring markets. We summarize cases where the lab may understate the importance of social preferences as well as instances in which the lab might exaggerate their importance. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of interpreting laboratory and field data through the lens of theory.

Haruka Uchida

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Concealing candidate identities during evaluations, or "blinding", is often proposed as a tool for combatting discrimination. I study how blinding impacts candidate selection and quality, and the forms of discrimination driving these effects. I conduct a natural field experiment at an academic conference, running each submitted paper through both blind and non-blind review. Four years after the experiment, I collect proxy measures of paper quality—citations and publication statuses—for each paper and link it to the experimental data. I find that blinding significantly reduces scores for traditionally high-scoring groups, and consequently alters the composition of applicants who are accepted to the conference. Despite these compositional changes, blinding does not worsen the conference's ability to select high-quality papers. I develop a model of evaluator discrimination that allows me to rationalize these effects and decompose non-blind disparities into two distinct forms of discrimination: accurate statistical discrimination and bias.

Juan-Camilo Cardenas, Elinor Ostrom

Cited by*: 40 Downloads*: 34

The study of collective action requires an understanding of the individual incentives and of the institutional constraints that guide people in making choices about cooperating or defecting on the group facing the dilemma. The use of local ecosystems by groups of individuals is just one example where individual extraction increases well-being, but aggregate extraction decreases it. The use of economic experiments has enhanced the already diverse knowledge from theoretical and field sources of when and how groups can solve the problem through selfgoverning mechanisms. These studies have identified several factors that promote and limit collective action, associated with the nature of the production system that allows groups to benefit from a joint-access local ecosystem, and associated with the institutional incentives and constraints from both self-governed and externally imposed rules. In general, there is widespread agreement that cooperation can happen and be chosen by individuals as a rational strategy, beyond the "tragedy of the commons" prediction. A first step in this paper is to propose a set of layers of information that the individuals might be using to decide over their level of cooperation. The layers range from the material incentives that the specific production function imposes, to the dynamics of the game, to the composition of the group and the individual characteristics of the player. We next expand the experimental literature by analyzing data from a set of experiments conducted in the field with actual ecosystem users in three rural villages of Colombia using this framework. We find that repetition brings reciprocity motives into the decision making. Further, prior experience of the participants, their perception of external regulation, or the composition of the group in terms of their wealth and social position in the village, influence decisions to cooperate or defect in the experiment. The results suggest that understanding the multiple levels of the game, in terms of the incentives, the group and individual characteristics or the context, can help understand and therefore explore the potentials for solving the collective-action dilemma.

Frank W Marlowe

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 27

Most hypotheses proposed to explain human food sharing address motives, yet most tests of these hypotheses have measured only the patterns of food transfer. To choose between these hypotheses we need to measure people's propensity to share. To do that, I played two games (the Ultimatum and Dictator Games) with Hadza hunter-gatherers. Despite their ubiquitous food sharing, the Hadza are less willing to share in these games than people in complex societies are. They were also less willing to share in smaller camps than larger camps. I evaluate the various food-sharing hypotheses in light of these results.

Steven D Levitt, John A List, David H Reiley

Cited by*: 12 Downloads*: 11

The minimax argument represents game theory in its most elegant form: simple but with stark predictions. Although some of these predictions have been met with reasonable success in the field, experimental data have generally not provided results close to the theoretical predictions. In a striking study, Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2007) present evidence that potentially resolves this puzzle: both amateur and professional soccer players play nearly exact minimax strategies in laboratory experiments. In this paper, we establish important bounds on these results by examining the behavior of four distinct subject pools: college students, bridge professionals, world-class poker players, who have vast experience with high-stakes randomization in card games, and American professional soccer players. In contrast to Palacios-Huerta and Volij's results, we find little evidence that real-world experience transfers to the lab in these games--indeed, similar to previous experimental results, all four subject pools provide choices that are generally not close to minimax predictions. We use two additional pieces of evidence to explore why professionals do not perform well in the lab: (1) complementary experimental treatments that pit professionals against preprogrammed computers, and (2) post-experiment questionnaires. The most likely explanation is that these professionals are unable to transfer their skills at randomization from the familiar context of the field to the unfamiliar context of the lab.

Daniel Hungerman, Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 34

There are independent literatures in economics considering tax-price and match-price incentives for giving. The match-price literature has produced well-identified small price elasticities, but scholars have widely questioned whether these estimates can inform tax policy. The tax-price literature in contrast has produced a large range of estimates. Here, we explore and compare these different incentives. First, we consider tax incentives for giving by focusing on a state-level tax credit that creates a convex kink. We use traditional, as well as more novel, kink methods to estimate the tax-price elasticity of giving. Second, a subgroup of donors in our data were temporarily offered a match for their gifts, creating an opportunity to compare tax-price and match-price effects for the same group of donors giving to the same organization at the same time. We find the tax-price elasticity is about -.2. The match-price elasticity is essentially the same. Our results thus suggest a small tax-price elasticity, close to the match-price elasticity, and close to match-price elasticity estimates in the experimental match-price literature. The implication is that in the giving environment we investigate the match-price elasticity is informative for tax policy.

Eric Floyd, Michael Hallsworth, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe, Kristian Rotaru, Ivo Vlaev

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

In this study, we first present a large natural field experiment that tested messages aimed at increasing tax compliance. We find that the main drivers of changes in compliance are messages describing the monitoring and enforcement behavior of the tax collector. A second natural field experiment built on the results of the first experiment to further investigate what kinds of costs resulting from tax collector oversight are salient to taxpayers. Specific time and cognitive incentives did not significantly increase payment rates, whereas stating non-specific costs of inaction did. Additional analyses suggest the increase in compliance is likely due to a 'fill in the blank' effect in which taxpayers assume the consequence is a fine. Interestingly, specifically stating maximum fine or jailtime consequences have the largest effect in a laboratory setting but only if the consequences are interpreted as realistic. Overall, our study reinforces that tax authorities can use short messages to increase tax compliance; the estimated accelerated revenue from the two field studies amounts to 9.9m GBP.

Vegard Iversen, Cecile Jackson, Bereket Kebede, Alistair Munro, Arjan Verschoor

Cited by*: 7 Downloads*: 23

We test core theories of the household using variants of a public good game and experimental data from 240 couples in rural Uganda. Spouses do not maximise surplus from cooperation and realise a greater surplus when women are in charge. This violates assumptions of unitary and cooperative models. When women control the common account, they receive less than when men control it; this contradicts standard bargaining models. Women contribute less than men and are rewarded more generously by men than vice versa. This casts doubt on postulates in Sen (1990). While the absence of altruism is rejected, we find evidence for opportunism. The results are put in a socioeconomic context using quantitative and qualitative survey data. Assortative matching and correlates of bargaining power influence behaviour within the experiments. Our findings suggest that a one-size fits all?? model of the household is unlikely to be satisfactory.