Papers - All

Marianne Bertrand, Dean S Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, Jonathan Zinman

Cited by*: 7 Downloads*: 23

Numerous laboratory studies find that minor nuances of presentation and description change behavior in ways that are inconsistent with standard economic models. How much do these context effect matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to learn from experience? We report on a field experiment designed to address this question. A South African lender sent letters offering incumbent clients large, short-term loans at randomly chosen interest rates. The letters also contained independently randomized psychological "features" that were motivated by specific types of frames and cues shown to be powerful in the lab, but which, from a normative perspective, ought to have no impact. Consistent with standard economics, the interest rate significantly affected loan take-up. Inconsistent with standard economics, some of the psychological features also significantly affected take-up. The average effect of a psychological manipulation was equivalent to a one half percentage point change in the monthly interest rate. Interestingly, the psychological features appear to have greater impact in the context of less advantageous offers and persist across different income and education levels. In short, even in a market setting with large stakes and experienced customers, subtle psychological features appear to be powerful drivers of behavior. The findings pose a challenge for the social sciences: they suggest that psychological nuance matters but may be inherently difficult to predict given the impact of context. Successful incorporation of psychological features into field studies is likely to prove a vital, but nontrivial, addition to the formation of more general theories on when, why, and how frames and cues influence important decisions.

Jakob Alfitian, Dirk Sliwka, Timo Vogelsang

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Monetary incentives are widely used to align employees' actions with the objectives of employers. We conduct a field experiment in a retail chain to evaluate whether an attendance bonus reduces employee absenteeism. The RCT assigned 346 apprentices for one year to either a monetary attendance bonus, a time-off bonus or a control group. We find that neither form of the bonus reduced absenteeism, but the monetary bonus increased absence by around 45%. This backfiring effect is persistent and driven by the most recently hired apprentices. Survey results reveal that the bonus shifted the perception of absenteeism as acceptable behavior.

Justin Krieg, Anya Samek

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 6

What happens when charities compete? We begin to answer this question through a laboratory experiment in which subjects play two public goods games simultaneously. We systematically vary the incentives for contributing in one of the games - investigating the effects of recognition, a bonus conditional on contributing, and non-monetary sanctions - and measure the effect on contributions in both games. Monetary incentives in the form of conditional bonuses increase contributions, even when two games are played simultaneously. However, non-monetary incentives such as recognition and sanctions are less effective than in related literature on games played in isolation. Moreover, we find mixed evidence of the spillover effect of treatment on the un-treated games - bonuses increase contributions initially, recognition decreases contributions, and sanctions have no effect.

John A List, Fatemeh Momeni

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 82

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a cornerstone of modern business practice, developing from a "why" in the 1960s to a "must" today. Early empirical evidence on both the demand and supply sides has largely confirmed CSR's efficacy. This paper combines theory with a large-scale natural field experiment to connect CSR to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than 3,000 workers, we find that our usage of CSR increases employee misbehavior - 20% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duty when we introduce CSR. Complementary treatments suggest that "moral licensing" is at work, in that the "doing good" nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that hurts the firm. In this way, our data highlight a potential dark cloud of CSR, and serve to forewarn that such business practices should not be blindly applied.

Ted Gayer, John Horowitz, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 0

Clear Skies is an economist's approach to pollution reduction. We heartily endorse its core approach, while recommending surgery for a few minor blemishes.

Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 2

Studies show that identifying contributors significantly increases contributions to public goods. In practice, however, viewing identifiable information is costly, which may discourage people from accessing such information. To address this question, we design a public goods experiment in which participants can pay a fee to view information about identities and corresponding contributions of their group members. We then compare this to a treatment in which there is no identifiable information, and a treatment in which all contributors are freely identified. Our main findings are that: (1) contributions in the treatment with costly information are as high as those in the treatment with free information, (2) participants choose to view the information about 10% of the time, and (3) being a high contributor is positively correlated with choosing to view identifiable information about others. Thus, it seems that having access to information is important even when such information is rarely viewed. Our findings have practical implications for non-profit organizations with a large pool of donors and for designers of recognition systems, especially in online communities with many participants.

Manuela Angelucci, Silvia Prina, Heather Royer, Anya Samek

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 33

How do peers influence the impact of incentives? Despite much work on incentives, little is known about the spillover effects of incentives. We investigate two mechanisms by which these effects can occur: through peers' actions and peers' incentives. In a field experiment on snack choice (grapes versus cookies), we randomize who receives incentives, the fraction of peers incentivized, and whether or not it can be observed that peers' choices are incentivized among over 1,500 children in the school lunchroom. Incentives increase the likelihood of initially choosing grapes. However, peer spillover effects can be large enough to undo these positive effects.

Indranil Goswami, Oleg Urminsky

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

How does setting a donation option as the default in a charitable appeal affect people's decisions? In eight studies, comprising 11,508 participants making 2,423 donation decisions in both experimental settings and a large scale-natural field experiment, we investigate the effect of "choice-option" defaults on the donation rate, average donation amount, and the resulting revenue. We find (1) a "lower-bar" effect, where defaulting a low amount increases donation rate, (2) a "scale-back" effect where low defaults reduce average donation amounts and (3) a "default-distraction' effect, where introducing any defaults reduces the effect of other cues, such as positive charity information. Contrary to the view that setting defaults will backfire, defaults increased revenue in our field study. However, our findings suggest that defaults can sometimes be a "self-cancelling" intervention, with countervailing effects of default option magnitude on decisions and resulting in no net effect on revenue. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on fundraising specifically, for choice architecture and behavioral interventions more generally, as well as for the use of "nudges" in policy decisions.

Omar Azfar, Clifford Zinnes

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

One conjecture in the theory of incentives is that incentives based on broader outcomes may be better at motivating agents than incentives based on narrow measures. We designed an experiment to test these hypotheses using a ""prospective randomized evaluation procedure"" (PREP). We then apply PREP to training programs as typically funded by donors of economic development assistance. We randomly assigned 274 participating entrepreneurs in the Philippines to one of 26, simultaneous, one-day, training classes in marketing. Trainers were given cash incentives based on the average score of their ""students"" on a standardized test containing an alternative number of questions, which were randomly assigned to each class. We then examined outcomes based on student satisfaction ratings of the trainer. Our results suggest that incentives based on broad outcomes are more effective than incentives based on narrow outcomes. We conclude with ways to improve our approach as well as with a discussion of the implications for using prospective randomized evaluation for improving the evaluation of donor projects.

Omar Azfar, Clifford Zinnes

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 20

One conjecture in the theory of incentives is that incentives based on broader outcomes may be better at motivating agents than incentives based on narrow measures. We designed an experiment to test these hypotheses using a "prospective randomized evaluation procedure" (PREP). We then apply PREP to training programs as typically funded by donors of economic development assistance. We randomly assigned 274 participating entrepreneurs in the Philippines to one of 26, simultaneous, one-day, training classes in marketing. Trainers were given cash incentives based on the average score of their "students" on a standardized test containing an alternative number of questions, which were randomly assigned to each class. We then examined outcomes based on student satisfaction ratings of the trainer. Our results suggest that incentives based on broad outcomes are more effective than incentives based on narrow outcomes. We conclude with ways to improve our approach as well as with a discussion of the implications for using prospective randomized evaluation for improving the evaluation of donor projects.

Il-Horn Hann, Kai-Lung Hui, Yee-Lin Lai, S.Y.T. Lee, I.P.L. PNG

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 4

Using a field experiment, we investigate whether, and if so, how spam is targeted. By comparing the spam rates among a set of synthetic email accounts, we find that spam is targeted to clients of particular email providers, users who declared interest in particular products or services, and consumer segments that are relatively more likely to make online purchases.

Ori Heffetz, John A List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Carefully designed scientific experiments have been an engine of economic, technological, and social progress for well over a century, which is why the public generally trusts such methods. Unfortunately, governments around the world still routinely oppose controlled trials of public policies.

John A List

Cited by*: 46 Downloads*: 69

In this introduction to the symposium, I first offer an overview of the spectrum of experimental methods in economics, from laboratory experiments to the field experiments that are the subject of this symposium. I then offer some thoughts about the potential gains from doing economic research using field experiments and my own mental checklist of 14 steps to improve the chances of carrying out an economics field experiment successfully.

John A List, Dana L Suskind

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Op-ed

Anne Rozan, Anne Stenger, Marc Willinger

Cited by*: 22 Downloads*: 39

We study the impact of new information about food safety on subjects' willingness-to-pay for food products, in an experimental setting. We elicit prices using either a second price auction or the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak procedure. There are three stages of bidding. In stage 1, subjects bid for products without any information. In stage 2, public information about health impact is provided. In stage 3, new certified products become available, and subjects bid then for non-certified and certified products. The introduction of certified products induces an asymmetric updating of initial bids, bids for non-certified products are lowered, but bids for certified products remain equal to the initial bids.

Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo

Cited by*: 336 Downloads*: 40

This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women's leadership on policy decisions. In 1998, one third of all leadership positions of Village Councils in West Bengal were randomly selected to be reserved for a woman: in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head. Village Councils are responsible for the provision on many local public good in rural areas. Using a data set we collected on 165 Village Councils, we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Villages Councils. We show that women invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of rural women (water, fuel, and roads), while men invest more in education. Women are more likely to participate in the policy-making process if the leader of their village council is a woman.

Syon Bhanot, Jiyoung Han, Chaning Jang

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Restrictions like work requirements and constraints on voucher transfers are often used in social welfare systems, but little empirical evidence exists on their impact on wellbeing. We conducted a 10-day randomized experiment with 432 individuals living below the poverty line in the Kawangware settlement of Nairobi, kenya, testing two elements of social welfare design: workfare versus welfare and restricted versus unrestricted vouchers. Participants were randomly assigned to a "Work" condition, involving daily work for unrestricted vouchers, or one of two "Wait" conditions, involving daily waiting for vouchers that were either unrestricted or partially restricted to staple foods. We find that working improved psychological wellbeing relative to waiting, suggesting that means of implementing welfare programs may have important effects on individuals beyond the impact of monetary benefit alone. Furthermore, although restrictions were inframarginal, partially restricted vouchers crowded-in spending on staple foods, suggesting the existence of a "flypaper effect" in spending from restricted vouchers.

Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 6

Intestinal helminths - including hookworm, roundworm, schistosomiasis, and whipworm - infect more than one-quarter of the world's population. A randomized evaluation of a project in Kenya suggests that school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs reduced school absenteeism in treatment schools by one quarter; gains are especially large among the youngest children. Deworming is found to be cheaper than alternative ways of boosting school participation. By reducing disease transmission, deworming creates substantial externality health and school participation benefits among untreated children in the treatment schools and among children in neighboring schools. These externalities are large enough to justify fully subsidizing treatment. We do not find evidence that deworming improves academic test scores. Existing experimental studies, in which treatment is randomized among individuals in the same school, find small and insignificant deworming treatment effects on education; however, these studies underestimate true treatment effects if deworming creates positive externalities for the control group and reduces treatment group attrition.

U. Rashid Sumalia, Daniel J Skerritt, Anna Schuhbauer, Sebastian Villasante, Andres M Cisneros-Montemayor, Hussain Sinan, Duncan Burnside, Patrízia Raggi Abdallah, Keita Abe, Juliano Palacios Abrantes, Kwasi A Addo, Julia Adelsheim, Ibukun J Adewumi, Olanike K Adeyemo, Neil Adger, Joshua Adotey, Sahir Advani, Zahidah Afrin, Denis Aheto, Shehu L Akintola, Wisdom Akpalu, Lubna Alam, Juan José Alava, Edward H Allison, Diva J Amon, John M Anderies, Christopher M Anderson, Evan Andrews, Ronaldo Angelini, Zuzy Anna, Werner Antweiler, Evans K Arizi, Derek Armitage, Robert I Arthur, Noble Asare, Frank Asche, Berchie Asiedu, Francis Asuquo, Marta Flotats Aviles, Lanre Badmus, Megan Bailey, Natalie Ban, Edward B Barbier, Shanta Barley, Colin Barnes, Scott Barrett, Xavier Basurto, Dyhia Belhabib, Nathan J Bennett, Elena Bennett, Dominique Benzaken, Robert Blasiak, John J Bohorquez, Cesar Bordehore, Virginie Bornarel, David R Boyd, Denise Breitburg, Cassandra Brooks, Lucas Brotz, Duncan Burnside, Donovan Campbell, Sara Cannon, Ling Cao, Juan C Cardenas Campo, Griffin Carpenter, Steve Carpenter, Richard T Carson, Adriana R Carvalho, Mauricio Castrejón, Alex J Caveen, M Nicole Chabi, Kai M A Chan, F Stuart Chapin, Tony Charles, William Cheung, Villy Christensen, Ernest O Chuku, Trevor Church, Andrés M Cisneros-Montemayor, Colin Clark, Tayler M Clarke, Andreea L Cojocaru, Brian Copeland, Brian Crawford, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Larry B Crowder, Philippe Cury, Allison N Cutting, Gretchen C Daily, Jose Maria Da-Rocha, Abhipsita Das, Savior K S Deikumah, Mairin Deith, Santiago de la Puente, Boris Dewitte, Nancy Doubleday, Carlos M Duarte, Nicholas K Dulvy, Bárbara B Horta e Costa, Tyler Eddy, Maeghan Efford, Paul R Ehrlich, Laura G Elsler, Kafayat A Fakoya, A Eyiwunmi Falaye, Jessica Fanzo, Clare Fitzsimmons, Ola Flaaten, Katie R N Florko, Carl Folke, Andrew Forrest, Peter Freeman, Kátia M F Freire, Rainer Froese, Thomas L Frölicher, Austin Gallagher, Veronique Garcon, Maria A Gasalla, Mark Gibbons, Kyle Gillespie, Alfredo Giron-Nava, Kristina Gjerde, Sarah Glaser, Christopher Golden, Line Gordon, Hugh Govan, Rowenna Gryba, Benjamin S Halpern, Quentin Hanich, Mafaniso Hara, Christopher D G Harley, Sarah Harper, Michael Harte, Rebecca Helm, Cullen Hendrix, Christina C Hicks, Lincoln Hood, Carie Hoover, Kristen Hopewell, Jonathan D R Houghton, Johannes A Iitembu, Moenieba Isaacs, Sadique Isahaku, Gakushi Ishimura, Monirul Islam, Ibrahim Issifu, Jeremy Jackson, Jennifer Jacquet, Olaf P Jensen, Xue Jin, Alberta Jonah, Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, S Kim Juniper, Sufian Jusoh, Isigi Kadagi, Masahide Kaeriyama, Michel J Kaiser, Brooks Alexandra Kaiser, Omu Kakujaha-Matundu, Selma T Karuaihe, Mary Karumba, Jennifer D Kemmerly, Ahmed S Khan, Katrick Kimani, Kristin Kleisner, Nancy Knowlton, Dawn Kotowicz, John Kurien, Lian E Kwong, Steven Lade, Dan Laffoley, Vicky W L Lam, Glenn-Marie Lange, Mohd T Latif, Philippe Le Billon, Valérie Le Brenne, Frédéric Le Manach, Simon A Levin, Lisa Levin, Karin E Limburg, John A List, Amanda T Lombard, Priscila F M Lopes, Heike K Lotze, Tabitha G Mallory, Roshni S Mangar, Daniel Marszalec, Precious Mattah, Juan Mayorga, Carol Mcausland, DOuglas J McCauley, Jeffrey McLean, Karley McMullen, Frank Meere, Annie Mejaes, Michael Melnychuk, Jaime Mendo, Fiorenza Micheli, Katherine Millage, Dana Miller, Kolliyil Sunil Mohamed, Essam Mohammed, Mazlin Mokhtar, Lance Morgan, Umi Muawanah, Gordon R Munro, Grant Murray, Saleem Mustafa, Prateep Nayak, Dianne Newell, Tu Nguyen, Frederik Noack, Adibi M Nor, Francis K E Nunoo, David Obura, Tom Okey, Isaac Okyere, Paul Onyango, Maartje Oostdijk, Polina Orlov, Henrik Österblom, Tessa Owens, Dwight Owens, Mohammed Oyinlola, Nathan Pacoureau, Evgeny Pakhomov, Unai Pascual, Aurélien Paulmier, Daniel Pauly, Rodrigue Orobiyi Edéya Pèlèbè, Daniel Peñalosa, Maria G Pennino, Garry Peterson, Thuy T T Pham, Evelyn Pinkerton, Stephen Polasky, Nicholas V C Polunin, Ekow Prah, Ingrid Van Putten, Jorge Ramírez, Jorge Jimenez Ramon, Veronica Relano, Gabriel Reygondeau, Don Robadue, Callum Roberts, Alex Rogers, Katina Roumbedakis, Enric Sala, Gret Van Santen, Marten Scheffer, Anna Schuhbauer, Kathleen Segerson, Juan Carlos Seijo, Karen C Seto, Jason F Shogren, Jennifer J Silver, Hussain Sinan, Gerald Singh, Daniel J Skerritt, Ambre Soszynski, Dacotah-Victoria Splichalova, Margaret Spring, Jesper Stage, Fabrice Stephenson, Bryce D Stewart, Riad Sultan, U Rashid Sumaila, Curtis Suttle, Alessandro Tagliabue, Amadou Tall, Nicolás Talloni-Álvarez, Alessandro Tavoni, D R Fraser Taylor, Lydia C L Teh, Louise S L Teh, Jean-Baptiste Thiebot, Torsten Thiele, Shakuntala H Thilsted, Romola V Thumbadoo, Michelle Tigchelaar, Richard S J Tol, Philippe Tortell, Max Troell, M Selçuk Uzmanoglu, Sebastian Villasante, Juan Villaseñor-Derbez, Colette C C Wabnitz, Melissa Walsh, J P Walsh, Nina Wambiji, Elke U Weber, Frances Westley, Stella Williams, Mary S Wisz, Boris Worm, Lan Xiao, Nobuyuki Yagi, Satoshi Yamazaki, Hong Yang, Aart de Zeeuw, Dirk Zeller

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Letter in Science Magazine

John A List

Cited by*: 70 Downloads*: 34

This study examines social preferences in three distinct field environments. In the first field setting, I allow consumers of all age and education levels to participate in one-shot and multiple-shot public goods games in a well-functioning marketplace. The second field study, an actual university capital campaign, gathers data from mail solicitations sent to 2,000 Central Florida residents. In the third field experiment, I examine data from an uncontrolled environment, a television gameshow, which closely resembles the classic prisoner's dilemma game. Several insights emerge; perhaps the most provocative is that age and social preferences appear linked.