Papers - All

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.

Jim Engle-Warnick, Javier Escobal, Sonia Laszlo

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 23

No abstract available

John A List, Anya Samek

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 13

Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S., with now almost a third of children ages 2-19 deemed overweight or obese. In this study, we leverage recent findings from behavioral economics to explore new approaches to tackling one aspect of childhood obesity: food choice and consumption. Using a field experiment where we include more than 1,500 children, we report several key insights. First, we find that individual incentives can have large influences: in the control, only 17% of children prefer the healthy snack, whereas the introduction of small incentives increases take-up of the healthy snack to roughly 75%, more than a four-fold increase. There is some evidence that the effects continue after the treatment period, consistent with a model of habit formation. Second, we find little evidence that the framing of incentives (loss versus gain) matters. While incentives work, we find that educational messaging alone has little influence on food choice. Yet, we do observe an important interaction effect between messaging and incentives: together they provide an important influence on food choice. For policymakers, our findings show the power of using incentives to combat childhood obesity. For academics, our approach opens up an interesting combination of theory and experiment that can lead to a better understanding of theories that explain healthy decisions and what incentives can influence them.

Abigail Barr

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 8

This paper presents rigorous and direct tests of two assumptions relating to limited commitment and asymmetric information that underpin current models of risk pooling. A specially designed economic experiment involving 678 subjects across 23 Zimbabwean villages is used to solve the problems of observability and quantification that have frustrated previous attempts to conduct such tests. I find that more extrinsic commitment is associated with more risk pooling, but that more information is associated with less risk pooling. The first of these results accords with our expectations and assumptions. The second does not. I offer two explanations as to the origin of the second result and discuss their implications for how we view the assumptions made elsewhere in the literature. I also conduct a test of the relevance or external validity of the experimental results to our understanding of real risk pooling behaviour. In four out of the five villages for which the test could be conducted the networks of risk pooling contracts constructed during the experiment and the networks existing in real life were significantly correlated.

Abigail Barr, Jose Garcia-Montalvo, Magnus Lindelow, Pieter Serneels

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 11

We explore the value of the strategy method to field experimentalists. Specifically, we demonstrate that, while the method may lead to reductions in subject understanding, it also generates valuable insights. We played the Third Party Punishment Game and the Generalized Trust Game with Ethiopian medical and nursing students applying the strategy method to the responding role in each case. Then, making use of two proxy measures for the students` cognitive abilities, we investigate the relationship between strategy-type choices and subject understanding. Thus, we find support for the assertion that apparently random and internally inconsistent strategies are symptomatic of problems of cognition. We also find support for the often, implicitly made assumption that, in BDM-type trust games, the ratio of what is returned to what is sent is an appropriate focus for comparative analyses of responder behaviour. Finally, we find evidence that an observed difference in third party punishing behaviour between Swiss and Ethiopian students is due, not to misunderstanding, but to variations in what is perceived as punishable. Our results lead us to conclude that the strategy method is of considerable value in Third Party Punishment Games, but need not be routinely applied in BDM-type trust games.

Peter Bohm, Hans Lind

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 11

Preference reversal, or choice/reservation-price inconsistency, has been documented experimentally for certain types of lotteries. We argue that the relevance of these findings for real-world markets is uncertain because the type of objects used cannot exist on a market and because the extent to which the subjects had any real interest in the objects is unknown. Using real-world lotteries, we have tested choice/price consistency on subjects who prefer lotteries to cash. Preference reversal was observed, but the frequency was much lower than in earlier experiments. There were no differences between subjects who qualify as ""lottery interested"" and those who did not.

Tanjim Hossain, John Morgan

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 8

We conducted 80 auctions on eBay. Forty of these auctions were for various popular music CDs while the remaining 40 auctions were for video games for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console. The revenue equivalence theorem states that any auction form having the same effective reserve price yields the same expected revenue. The effective reserve price on eBay consists of three components: the opening bid amount, the secret reserve amount, and the shipping and handling charge to keep the overall reserve level fixed. We set no secret reserve price and varied the opening bid and the shipping and handling charge to keep the overall reserve level fixed. When the effective reserve was $4, auctions with a low opening bid and high shipping charges attracted more bidders, earlier bidding, and yielded higher revenue than those with a high opening bid and low shipping charges. The same results hold only for Xbox games under the $8 effective reserve. Unlike the other treatments, where the reserve represents less than 30% of the retail price of the item, for CDs, the $8 effective reserve represents over 50% of the retail price of the item. In this treatment, we find no systematic difference in the number of bidders attracted to the auction or revenues as a function of how the effective reserve is allocated between opening bid and shipping charges. We show that these results can be accounted for by bounded-rational bidding behavior.

Jay R Corrigan, Matthew C Rousu

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 18

Policymakers are considering including stricter standards in international trade agreements. Using auctions to assess preferences, we find that the median consumer places no premium on fair trade foods produced under more stringent labor and environmental standards. This indicates that current trade policies may be preferable to U.S. consumers.

Charles Bellemare, Sabine Kroger, Arthur van Soest

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 9

We combine the choice data of proposers and responders in the ultimatum game, their expectations elicited in the form of subjective probability questions, and the choice data of proposers (dictators) in a dictator game to estimate a structural model of decision making under uncertainty. We use a large and representative sample of subjects drawn from the Dutch population. Our results indicate that there is considerable heterogeneity in preferences for equity in the population. Changes in preferences have an important impact on decisions of dictators in the dictator game and responders in the ultimatum game, but a smaller impact on decisions of proposers in the ultimatum game, a result due to proposers subjective expectations about responders decisions. The model which uses subjective data on expectations has better predictive power and lower noise level than a model which assumes that players have rational expectations.

Omar Isaac Asensio, Magali A Delmas

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: None

Little is known about the effect of message framing on conservation behavior over time. In a randomized controlled trial with residential households, we use advanced metering and information technologies to test how different messages about household energy use impact the dynamics of conservation behavior down to the appliance level. Our results, based on 374 million panel observations of kilowatt-hour (kWh) electricity consumption for 118 households over 9 months, show that differences in behavioral responses due to message framing become more significant over time. We find that a health-based frame, in which households consider the human health effects of their marginal electricity use, induced persistent energy savings behavior of 8-10% over 100 days; whereas a more traditional cost savings frame, drove sharp attenuation of treatment effects after 2 weeks with no significant savings versus control after 7 weeks. We discuss the implications for the design of effective information campaigns to engage households in conservation behavior.

John A List, Imran Rasul

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 46

We overview the use of field experiments in labor economics. We showcase studies that highlight the central advantages of this methodology, which include: (i) using economic theory to design the null and alternative hypotheses; (ii) engineering exogenous variation in real world economic environments to establish causal relations and learning about the underlying mechanisms; and (iii) engaging in primary data collection and often working closely with practitioners. To highlight the potential for field experiments to inform issues in labor economics, we organize our discussion around the individual life cycle. We therefore consider field experiments related to the accumulation of human capital, the demand and supply of labor, behavior within firms, and close with a brief discussion of the nascent literature of field experiments related to household decision-making.

David H Herberich, Steven D Levitt, John A List

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 74

No abstract available

Peter Bohm

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 16

The robust laboratory evidence of preference reversal for lotteries has been interpreted as a threat to the general vailidity of standard theories of decision-making under uncertainty. This evidence is obtained from laboratory, that is, not real-world, lotteries with subjects who have not sought to make decisions among such lotteries. Here, the prevalence of preference reversal is studied in a field experiment with used cars, that is, a case of real-world non-trivial, non-lottery - but still payoff-uncertain - choice objects, and with subjects who registered as potential buyers of such cars. No sign of preference reversal was observed.

John A List, Robert D Metcalfe

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 14

Field experiments represent a relatively new area in economics to understand the causal links from one variable to another. They have been used by academics to help answer interesting and policy-relevant questions in the developed world relating to educational attainment, tax avoidance, consumer finance, negative externalities, charitable giving, and labour market contracts. In this paper we bring together the key ideas behind the different variants of field experiments, how field experiments have been used to test theory, their limitations, and the new areas currently being opened up by field experiments.

Xavier Gine, Pamela Jakiela, Dean S Karlan, Jonathan Morduch

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 15

Microfinance has been heralded as an effective way to address imperfections in credit markets. But from a theoretical perspective, the success of microfinance contracts has puzzling elements. In particular, the group-based mechanisms often employed are vulnerable to free-riding and collusion, although they can also reduce moral hazard and improve selection. The authors created an experimental economics laboratory in a large urban market in Lima, Peru and over seven months conducted 11 different games that allow them to unpack microfinance mechanisms in a systematic way. They find that risk-taking broadly conforms to predicted patterns, but that behavior is safer than optimal. The results help to explain why pioneering microfinance institutions have been moving away from group-based contracts.

Fuhai Hong, Tanjim Hossain, John A List

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 35

Exploiting findings that losses loom larger than gains, studies have shown that framing manipulations can increase productivity of workers. Using a natural field experiment that exogenously manipulates wage bonuses within contests in a Chinese high-tech manufacturing facility, we show that how loss aversion affects worker behavior critically depends on the incentive scheme as well as the framing manipulation. Four sets of two identical teams competed against each other to win a bonus given to the team, within a set, with the higher average hourly productivity over the week. In each set, the bonus was framed as a reward or gain for one team and as a punishment or loss for the other. Average weekly productivity was slightly higher under the loss treatment, but this increase was statistically insignificant. However, the team under the loss treatment was at least 35% more likely to win the contest. As teams' payoffs are based on relative productivity under a contest, framing effect is much stronger in terms of relative productivity. Finally, workers seemingly responded to the bonus by increasing the quality of production as well as quantity-defect rate fell as productivity increased.

John A List, Michael K Price

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 6

This study showcases the usefulness of field experiments to the study of environmental and resource economics. Our focus pertains to work related to field experiments in the area of 'behavioral' environmental and resource economics. Within this rubric, we discuss research in two areas: those that inform i) benefit cost analysis and ii) conservation of resources. Within each realm, we show how field experiments have been able to test the relevant theories, provide important parameters to construct new theories, and guide policymakers. We conclude with thoughts on how field experiments can be used to deepen our understanding of important areas within environmental and resource economics.

John A List, Daniel L Millimet

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 6

Devolution of tasks to local levels of government has recently become a popular agenda item within certain political factions in the US. While one expects the local policymaker to tailor policies to match the preferences of his constituents, critics of local policymaking claim that externalities are ignored and inefficiencies thus arise under local control of certain policies. A primary example concerns the control of pollution, which is known to have adverse effects on neighbouring jurisdictions. Whether localities actually 'race to the bottom' and enact lax environmental policies when given the chance remains an open issue. In this study, we make use of stochastic dominance tests to examine if President Reagan's policy of 'New Federalism' in the early 1980s induced states to lower environmental standards. Among the several environmental measures analysed, we do not find any evidence that the 'race to the bottom' materialized. Indeed, the evidence shows that even during these lean years of federal intervention several indicators of environmental quality at the state level continued to improve.

Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 3

We experimentally investigate the impact of visibility of contributors and cost of information on public good contributions. First, we vary recognizing all, highest or lowest contributors. Second, we investigate the effect of imposing a cost on viewing contributors. Recognizing all contributors significantly increases contributions relative to the baseline, even when viewing contributors' information is costly. This effect holds even though the identities of contributors are viewed less than ten percent of the time. Recognizing only highest contributors does not increase contributions compared to not recognizing contributors, but recognizing only lowest contributors is as effective as recognizing all contributors. These findings support our conjecture that aversion from shame is a more powerful motivator for giving than anticipation of prestige.

Irma Machielse, Danielle Timmermans, Peter Wakker

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 28

This paper presents a field study into the effects of statistical information concerning risks on willingness to take insurance, with special attention being paid to the usefulness of these effects for the clients (the insured). Unlike many academic studies, we were able to use in-depth individual interviews of a large representative sample from the general public (N = 476). The statistical information that had the most interesting effects, "individual own past-cost information," unfortunately enhanced adverse selection, which we could directly verify because the real health costs of the clients were known. For a prescriptive evaluation this drawback must be weighted against some advantages: a desirable interaction with risk attitude, increased customer satisfaction, and increased cost awareness. Descriptively, ambiguity seeking was found rather than ambiguity aversion, and no risk aversion was found for loss outcomes. Both findings, obtained in a natural decision context, deviate from traditional views in risk theory but are in line with prospect theory. We confirmed prospect theory's reflection at the level of group averages but falsified it at the individual level.