Papers - All

Joseph Henrich, Richard McElreath

Cited by*: 32 Downloads*: 33

Evidence shows that real-effort investments can affect bilateral bargaining outcomes. This paper investigates whether similar investments can inhibit equilibrium convergence of experimental markets. In one treatment, sellers' relative effort affects the allocation of production costs, but a random productivity shock ensures that the allocation is not necessarily equitable. In another treatment, sellers' effort increases the buyers' valuation of a good. We find that effort investments have a short-lived impact on trading behavior when sellers' effort benefits buyers, but no effect when effort determines cost allocation. Efficiency rates are high and do not differ across treatments.

Dean S Karlan, John A List, Eldar Shafir

Cited by*: 31 Downloads*: 29

To further our understanding of the economics of charity, we conducted a natural field experiment. Making use of two direct mail solicitations sent to nearly 20,000 prior donors to a charity, we tested the effectiveness of $1:$1 and $1:$3 matching grants on charitable giving. We find only weak evidence that either of the matches work; in fact, for the full sample, the match only increased giving after the match deadline expired. Yet, the aggregation masks important heterogeneities: those donors who are actively supporting the organization tend to be positively influenced whereas lapsed givers are either not affected or adversely affected. Furthermore, some presentations of the match can do harm, e.g., when an example amount given is high ($75) and the match ratio is below $1:$1. Overall, the results help clarify what might cause people to give and provide further evidence that larger match ratios are not necessarily superior to smaller match ratios.

Cannon Koo, John A List, Michael Margolis, Jason F Shogren

Cited by*: 31 Downloads*: 9

Second-price auctions are designed to induce people to reveal their private preferences for a good. Laboratory evidence suggests that while these auctions do a reasonable job on aggregate, they fall short at the individual level, especially for bidders who are off-margin of the market-clearing price. Herein we introduce and explore whether a random nth-price auction can engage all bidders to bid sincerely. Our results first show that the random nth-price auction can induce sincere bidding in theory and practice. We then compare the random nth-price to the second-price auction. We find that the second-price auction works better on-margin, and the random nth-price auction works better off-margin.

John A List, Daniel Rondeau

Cited by*: 31 Downloads*: 11

This study designs a natural field experiment linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine the effectiveness of matching gifts and challenge gifts, two popular strategies used to secure a portion of the $200 billion annually given to charities. We find evidence that challenge gifts positively influence contributions in the field, but matching gifts do not. Methodologically, we find important similarities and dissimilarities between behavior in the lab and the field. Overall, our results have clear implications for fundraisers and provide avenues for future empirical and theoretical work on charitable giving.

Catherine C Eckel, Philip J Grossman

Cited by*: 30 Downloads*: 26

We report the results of a field experiment conducted in conjunction with a mailed fundraising campaign of a nonprofit organization. The experiment is designed to compare the response of donors to subsidies in the form of matching amounts or rebated amounts. Matching subsidies are used by many corporations as an employee benefit; the US federal tax system encourages giving using a rebate subsidy by making donations tax deductible. The design includes a control group and two levels of subsidy of each type. Our main result is that matching subsidies result in larger total donations to charities than rebate subsidies, a result that is qualitatively similar to the lab findings. The estimated price elasticities for the matching subsidy are very similar to (and insignificantly different from) the lab experiments, while rebate subsidies lead to lower contributions in the field than in the lab. Since rebates in the field involve substantial lags and additional complications as compared with the "instant rebates" of the lab, this latter difference is not unexpected. The matching results are an important step in validating lab estimates of responsiveness to subsidies of charitable giving.

John A List, David Lucking-Reiley

Cited by*: 29 Downloads*: 1

n/a

Glenn W Harrison, Morten I Lau, Elisabet E Rutstrom, Melonie B Williams

Cited by*: 29 Downloads*: 303

We design experiments to jointly elicit risk and time preferences for the adult Danish population. The experimental procedures build on laboratory experiments that have been evaluated using traditional subject pools. The field experiments utilize field sampling designs that we developed, and procedures that were chosen to be relatively transparent in the field with non-standard subject pools. Our overall design was also intended to be a general template for such field experiments in other countries. We examine the characterization of risk over a wider domain for each subject than previous experiments, allowing more precise estimates of risk attitudes. We also examine individual discount rates over six time horizons, as the first stage in a panel experiment in which we revisit subjects to test consistency and stability of responses over time. Risk and time preferences are heterogeneous, varying by observable individual characteristics. On a methodological level, we implement a refinement of existing procedures which elicits much more precise estimates, and also mitigates framing effects.

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.

Erwin Bulte, Andreas Kontoleon, John A List, Ty Turley, Maarten Voors

Cited by*: 27 Downloads*: 78

We use a sample of subsistence farmers in Sierra Leone as respondents to compare behavior in a context-free experiment (a standard public goods game) and behavior in the field (a real development intervention). There is no meaningful correlation in behavior across contexts. This casts doubt on the prospect of using lab experiments as "predictors" of behavior in real life.

Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, Esther Duflo, Leigh Linden

Cited by*: 25 Downloads*: 14

This paper presents the results of two randomized experiments conducted in schools in urban India. A remedial education program hired young women to teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills. It increased average test scores of all children in treatment schools by 0.28 standard deviation, mostly due to large gains experienced by children at the bottom of the test-score distribution. A computer-assisted learning program focusing on math increased math scores by 0.47 standard deviation. One year after the programs were over, initial gains remained significant for targeted children, but they faded to about 0.10 standard deviation.

Bradley J Ruffle, Richard Sosis

Cited by*: 24 Downloads*: 13

No abstract available

John A List, Jason F Shogren

Cited by*: 24 Downloads*: 1

Examining panel data on bidding behavior in over forty second-price auction markets with repeated trials, we observe that (i) posted prices influence the behavior of the median naive bidder; (ii) posted prices do not affect the behavior of the median experienced bidder or the bidder for familiar goods; and (iii) anticipated strategic behavior wanes after two trials. The results suggest that while affiliation might exist in auctions for new goods, the repeated trial design with nonprice information removes the correlation of values and provides the experience that bidders need to understand the market mechanism.

Glenn W Harrison, John A List

Cited by*: 23 Downloads*: 10

There has been a dramatic increase in the use of experimental methods in the past two decades. An oft-cited reason for this rise in popularity is that experimental methods provide the necessary control to estimate treatment effects in isolation of other confounding factors. We examine the relevance of experimental findings from laboratory settings that abstract from the field context of the task that theory purports to explain. Using common value auction theory as our guide, we identify naturally occurring settings in which one can test the theory. In our treatments the subjects are not picked at random, as in lab experiments with student subjects, but are deliberately identified by their trading roles in the natural field setting. We find that experienced agents bidding in familiar roles do not fall prey to the winner's curse. Yet, when experienced agents are observed bidding in an unfamiliar role, we find that they frequently fall prey to the winner's curse. We conclude that the theory predicts field behavior well when one is able to identify naturally occurring field counterparts to the key theoretical conditions.

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.

Colin F Camerer

Cited by*: 23 Downloads*: 19

To test whether naturally occurring markets can be strategically manipulated, $500 and $1,000 bets were made, then cancelled, at horse racing tracks. The net effects of these costless temporary bets give clues about how market participants react to information large bets might contain. The bets moved odds on horses visibly (compared to matched-pair control horses with similar prebet odds) and had a slight tendency to draw money toward the horse that was temporarily bet, but the net effect was close to zero and statistically insignificant. The results suggest that some bettors inferred information from bets and others did not, and their actions roughtly cancelled out.

Abhijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, Esther Duflo

Cited by*: 23 Downloads*: 44

There is surprisingly little information about the delivery of health care in rural India, and about the relationship, if any, between health care and health status. Some, such as the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health of the World Health Organization (2001), have argued that better health care is the key to improving health as well as economic growth in poor countries, but there is little systematic evidence that gives us a sense of how easy it is to impact the quality of health care delivery in developing countries and through these improvements to impact the health of the population. 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 we 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.

Amanda Agan, Sonja Starr

Cited by*: 22 Downloads*: 27

"Ban-the-Box" (BTB) policies restrict employers from asking about applicants' criminal histories on job applications and are often presented as a means of reducing unemployment among black men, who disproportionately have criminal records. However, withholding information about criminal records could risk encouraging statistical discrimination: employers may make assumptions about criminality based on the applicant's race (or other observable characteristics). To investigate BTB's effects, we sent approximately 15,000 fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City both before and after the adoption of BTB policies. These applications varied the race and felony conviction status of the applicants. We confirm that criminal records are a major barrier to employment: employers that ask about criminal records were 63% more likely to call back an applicant if he has no record. However, our results support the concern that BTB policies encourage statistical discrimination on the basis of race: we find that the race gap in callbacks grows dramatically at the BTB-affected companies after the policy goes into effect. Before BTB, white applicants to employers with the box received 7% more callbacks than similar black applicants, but BTB increases this gap to 45%.

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.

Robert Berrens , Alok Bohara, Joe Kerkvliet, John A List

Cited by*: 22 Downloads*: 1

n/a

Raymond C Battalio, Leonard Green, John H Kagel

Cited by*: 22 Downloads*: 70

No abstract available