Papers - All

Sarah Ahmed , John Beshears , James Choi , Joelle Friedman , Jonathan Kolstad, Suzanne Linck , John A List, George Loewenstein, Brigitte Madrain , Barbara McGill, Stacey Sinkula , Kevin Volpp

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 8

We report results from two surveys of representative samples of Americans with private health insurance. The first examines how well Americans understand, and believe they understand, traditional health insurance coverage. The second examines whether those insured under a simplified all-copay insurance plan will be more likely to engage in cost-reducing behaviors relative to those insured under a traditional plan with deductibles and coinsurance, and measures consumer preferences between the two plans. The surveys provide strong evidence that consumers do not understand traditional plans and would better understand a simplified plan, but weaker evidence that a simplified plan would have strong appeal to consumers or change their healthcare choices.

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.

Craig E Landry, Andreas Lange, John A List, Michael K Price, Nicholas G Rupp

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 1

An important dialogue between theorists and experimentalists over the past few decades has raised the study of the interaction of psychological and economic incentives from academic curiosity to a bona fide academic field. One recent area of study within this genre that has sparked interest and debate revolves around the "hidden costs" of conditional incentives. This study overlays randomization on a naturally-occurring environment in a series of temporally-linked field experiments to advance our understanding of the economics of charity and test if such "costs" exist in the field. This approach permits us to examine why people initially give to charities, and what factors keep them committed to the cause. Several key findings emerge. First, there are hidden benefits of conditional incentives that would have gone undetected had we maintained a static theory and an experimental design that focused on short run substitution effects rather than dynamic interactions. Second, we can reject the pure altruism model of giving. Third, we find that public good provision is maximized in both the short and long run by using conditional, rather than unconditional, incentives.

David P Tracer

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 15

No abstract available

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.

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

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 87

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.

Mirco Tonin, Michael Vlassopoulos

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 18

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers' pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: action-oriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. To this end we employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces action-oriented altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find that action-oriented altruism accounts for a significant increase in effort, while there is no additional impact due to output-oriented altruism. We also find significant gender-related differences in the treatment effect: women are very responsive to the treatment condition eliciting action-oriented altruism, while men's behavior is not affected by any of the treatments.

Philip Oreopoulos, Uros Petronijevic

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 25

Recent studies show that programs offering structured, one-on-one coaching and tutoring tend to have large effects on the academic outcomes of both high school and college students. These programs are often costly to implement and difficult to scale, however, calling into question whether making them available to large student populations is feasible. In contrast, interventions that rely on technology to maintain low-touch contact with students can be implemented at large scale and minimal cost but with the risk of not being as effective as one-on-one, in-person assistance. In this paper, we test whether the effects of coaching programs can be replicated at scale by using technology to reach a larger population of students. We work with a sample of over four thousand undergraduate students from a large Canadian university, randomly assigning students into one of the following three interventions: (i) a one-time online exercise designed to affirm students' values and goals; (ii) a text messaging campaign that provides students with academic advice, information, and motivation; and (iii) a personal coaching service, in which students are matched with upper-year undergraduate coaches. We find large positive effects from the coaching program, as coached students realize a 0.3 standard deviation increase in average grades and a 0.35 standard deviation increase in GPA. In contrast, we find no effects from either the online exercise or the text messaging campaign on any academic outcome, both in the general student population and across several student subgroups. A comparison of the key features of the text messaging campaign and the coaching service suggests that proactively and regularly initiating conversations with students and working to establish trust are important design features to incorporate in future interventions that use technology to reach large populations of students.

John Gibson, David McKenzie, Steven Stillman

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 13

People migrate to improve their well-being, whether through an expansion of economic and social opportunities or a reduction in persecution. Yet a large literature suggests that migration can be a very stressful process, with potentially negative impacts on mental health reducing the net benefits of migration. However, to truly understand the effect of migration on mental health one must compare the mental health of migrants to what their mental health would have been had they stayed in their home country. The existing literature is not able to do this and typically settles for comparing the mental health of migrants to that of natives in the destination country, which takes no account of any pre-existing differences between these groups. This paper overcomes the selection problems affecting previous studies of the effect of migration on mental health by examining a migrant lottery program. New Zealand allows a quota of Tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery used to choose amongst the excess number of applicants. A unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the mental health effects of migration to be obtained by comparing the mental health of migrants who were successful applicants in the lottery to the mental health of those who applied to migrate under the quota, but whose names were not drawn in the lottery. Migration is found to lead to improvements in mental health, particularly for women and those with poor mental health in their home country.

Michael Chirico, Robert Inman, Charles Loeffler, John MacDonald, Holger Sieg

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 67

Property taxes play a central role in the financing of municipal government services. Yet, municipal governments commonly confront problems with property tax collection even when the tax base is known. There is surprisingly little evidence on what authorities can do to increase property tax compliance. This paper analyzes seven different property tax notification strategies through a randomized controlled experiment conducted with the City of Philadelphia. All seven notification strategies increase property tax compliance over the usual approach of simply sending a bill. The most effective notifications are the those that threaten to take out a lien on the property or to foreclose by sheriff's sale for continued failure to pay taxes. The results suggest that economic motives to pay property taxes are more effective than those that appeal to social norms.

John A List, Jan Stoop, Daan van Soest, Haiwen Zhou

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 3

Both private and public organizations constantly grapple with incentive schemes to induce maximum effort from agents. We begin with a theoretical exploration of optimal contest design, focusing on the number of competitors. Our theory reveals a critical link between the distribution of luck and the number of contestants. We find that if there is considerable (little) mass on good draws, equilibrium effort is an increasing (decreasing) function of the number of contestants. Our first test of the theory implements a laboratory experiment, where important features of the theory can be exogenously imposed. We complement our lab experiment with a field experiment, where we rely on biological models complemented by economic models to inform us of the relevant theoretical predictions. In both cases we find that the theory has a fair amount of explanatory power, allowing a deeper understanding of how to effectively design tournaments. From a methodological perspective, our study showcases the benefits of combining data from both lab and field experiments to deepen our understanding of the economic science.

Uri Gneezy, Alex Imas, John A List

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 6

We introduce a simple, easy to implement instrument for jointly eliciting risk and ambiguity attitudes. Using this instrument, we structurally estimate a two-parameter model of preferences. Our findings indicate that ambiguity aversion is significantly overstated when risk neutrality is assumed. This highlights the interplay between risk and ambiguity attitudes as well as the importance of joint estimation. In addition, over our stakes levels we find no difference in the estimated parameters when incentives are real or hypothetical, raising the possibility that a simple hypothetical question can provide insights into an individuals preferences over ambiguity in such economic environments.

Omar Al-Ubaydli, John A List

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 1

Economists are increasingly turning to the experimental method as a means to estimate causal effects. By using randomization to identify key treatment effects, theories previously viewed as untestable are now scrutinized, efficacy of public policies are now more easily verified, and stakeholders can swiftly add empirical evidence to aid their decision-making. This study provides an overview of experimental methods in economics, with a special focus on developing an economic theory of generalizability. Given that field experiments are in their infancy, our secondary focus pertains to a discussion of the various parameters that they identify, and how they add to scientific knowledge. We conclude that until we conduct more field experiments that build a bridge between the lab and the naturally-occurring settings of interest we cannot begin to make strong conclusions empirically on the crucial question of generalizability from the lab to the field.

Maria P Espinosa, Javier Gardeazabal

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 43

A disadvantage of multiple-choice tests is that students have incentives to guess. To discourage guessing, it is common to use scoring rules that either penalize wrong answers or reward omissions. These scoring rules are considered equivalent in psychometrics, although experimental evidence has not always been consistent with this claim. We model students' decisions and show, first, that equivalence holds only under risk neutrality and, second, that the two rules can be modified so that they become equivalent even under risk aversion. This paper presents the results of a filed experiment in which we analyze the decisions of subjects taking multiple-choice exams. The evidence suggests that differences between scoring rules are due to risk aversion as theory predicts. We also find that the number of omitted items depends on the scoring rule, knowledge, gender, and other covariates.

Paul Glewwe, Albert Park, Meng Zhao

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 19

About 10% of primary school students in developing countries have poor vision, yet in virtually all of these countries very few children wear glasses. There has been almost no research on the impact of poor vision on school performance in developing countries, and simple OLS estimates are likely to be biased because students who study more often are likely to develop poor vision faster. This paper presents results from a randomized trial in Western China that began in the summer of 2004. The trial involves over 19,000 students in 165 schools in two counties of Gansu province. The schools were randomly divided (at the township level) into 103 schools that received eyeglasses (for students in grades 4-6) and 62 schools that served as controls. The results indicate that, after one year, making eyeglasses available increased average test scores by 0.11 to 0.15 standard deviations (of the distribution of the test scores). For those students who accepted the glasses, average test scores increased by 0.15 to 0.22 standard deviations.

Alexander W Cappelen, John A List, Anya Samek, Bertil Tungodden

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 44

We present results from the first study to examine the causal impact of early childhood education on social preferences of children. We compare children who, at 3-4 years old, were randomized into either a full-time preschool, a parenting program with incentives, or to a control group. We returned to the same children when they reach 7-8 years old a conducted a series of incentivized experiments to elicit there social preferences. We find that early childhood education has a strong causal impact on social preferences several years after the intervention: attending preschool makes children more egalitarian in their fairness view and the parenting program enhances the importance children place on efficiency relative to fairness. Our findings highlight the importance of taking a broad perspective when designing and evaluating early childhood education programs, and provide evidence how differences in institutional exposure may contribute to explaining heterogeneity in social preferences in society.

Maurizio Bovi

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 29

To learn the people's expectations formation process, we examine shocks and survey expectations on individual and aggregate income. Data show that shocks have permanent effects on both expectations, which do not diverge systematically because agents revise forecasts. Actually, only expectations on GDP dynamics are revised. These latter overreact to shocks and are more volatile than expectations on personal stances. Disagreement is persistently high. Astonishingly, there is even less consensus when expectations deal with the same fundamental. Lastly, we elaborate a test on whether - and find evidence that - cross sectional disagreement and time series volatility in expectations are equal.

James Cox, John A List, Michael K Price, Vjollca Sadiraj, Anya Samek

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 123

The literature exploring other regarding behavior sheds important light on interesting social phenomena, yet less attention has been given to how the received results speak to foundational assumptions within economics. Our study synthesizes the empirical evidence, showing that recent work challenges convex preference theory but is largely consistent with rational choice theory. Guided by this understanding, we design a new, more demanding test of a central tenet of economics - the contraction axiom - within a sharing framework. Making use of more than 325 dictators participating in a series of allocation games, we show that sharing choices violate the contraction axiom. We advance a new theory that augments standard models with moral reference points to explain our experimental data. Our theory also organizes the broader sharing patterns in the received literature.

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Leigh Linden

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 54

This note presents the results obtained after the first year of a two-year randomized evaluation of a computer assisted learning (CAL) program in Vadodara, India. The CAL program, implemented by a NGO, took advantage of the donation of four computers to each municipal primary school in Vadodara by the state government. The program provided each child in the fourth standard with two hours of shared computer time in which students played educational games that reinforced mathematics competencies ranging from the standard 1 to the standard 3 level. We find the program to be quite effective. On average, it increased math scores by 0.37 standard deviations. The program effect is slightly higher at the bottom of the distribution but persists throughout the distribution. The program had no apparent spillover on language competencies.