Papers - All

John A List, Yana Peysakhovichc

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This paper examines aggregate time series data on individual charitable donations from 1968 to 2007. We find that changes in individual giving show an asymmetric response to changes in the S&P 500: individuals are more responsive to stock market upturns than downturns.

Erwin Bulte, John A List, Jason F Shogren

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An important public policy question that remains unresolved is whether devolution will enhance sensible policy making by exploiting informational asymmetries or, instead, trigger a "beggar thy neighbor" response and stimulate free riding amongst localities. We analyze this question within the framework of U.S. environmental policy making by scrutinizing a unique panel data set on state-level endangered species expenditure patterns. Our empirical estimates are consistent with the notion that states free ride, which may lead to an expenditure equilibrium that is not Pareto efficient.

Francis Larson, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe

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Behavioral economists have recently put forth a theoretical explanation for the equity premium puzzle based on combining myopia and loss aversion. Complementing the behavioral theory is evidence from laboratory experiments, which provide strong empirical support consistent with myopic loss aversion (MLA). Yet, whether, and to what extent, such preferences underlie behaviors of traders in their natural domain remains unknown. Indeed, a necessary condition for the MLA theory to explain the equity premium puzzle is for marginal traders in markets to exhibit such preferences. Using minute-by-minute trading observations from over 864,000 price realizations in a natural field experiment, we find data patterns consonant with MLA: in their normal course of business, professional traders who receive infrequent price information invest 33% more in risky assets, yielding profits that are 53% higher, compared to traders who receive frequent price information. Beyond testing theory, these results have important implications for efficient resource allocation as well as characterizing the optimal structure of social and economic policies.

Iwan Barankay, Magnus Johannesson, John A List, Richard Friberg, Matti Liski, Kjetil Storesletten

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No abstract available

Luigi Butera, John A List

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Novel empirical insights by their very nature tend to be unanticipated, and in some cases at odds with the current state of knowledge on the topic. The mechanics of statistical inference suggest that such initial findings, even when robust and statistically significant within the study, should not appreciably move priors about the phenomenon under investigation. Yet, a few well-conceived independent replications dramatically improve the reliability of novel findings. Nevertheless, the incentives to replicate are seldom in place in the sciences, especially within the social sciences. We propose a simple incentive-compatible mechanism to promote replications, and use experimental economics to highlight our approach. We begin by reporting results from an experiment in which we investigate how cooperation in allocation games is affected by the presence of Knightian uncertainty (ambiguity), a pervasive and yet unexplored characteristic of most public goods. Unexpectedly, we find that adding uncertainty enhances cooperation. This surprising result serves as a test case for our mechanism: instead of sending this paper to a peer-reviewed journal, we make it available online as a working paper, but we commit never to submit it to a journal for publication. We instead offered co-authorship for a second, yet to be written, paper to other scholars willing to independently replicate our study. That second paper will reference this working paper, will include all replications, and will be submitted to a peer- reviewed journal for publication. Our mechanism allows mutually-beneficial gains from trade between the original investigators and other scholars, alleviates the publication bias problem that often surrounds novel experimental results, and accelerates the advancement of economic science by leveraging the mechanics of statistical inference.

Daniel J Benjamin, James O Berger, Magnus Johannesson, Brian A Nosek, E. J Wagenmakers, Richard Berk, Kenneth A Bollen, Bjorn Brembs, Lawrence Brown, Colin F Camerer, David Cesarini, Christopher D. Chambers, Merlise Clyde, Thomas D Cook, Paul De Boeck, Zoltan Dienes, Anna Dreber, Kenny Easwaran, Charles Efferson, Ernst Fehr, Fiona Fidler, Andy P. Field, Malcom Forster, Edward I. George, Tarun Ramadorai, Richard Gonzalez, Steven Goodman, Edwin Green, Donald P Green, Anthony Greenwald, Jarrod D. Hadfield, Larry V. Hedges, Leonhard Held, Teck Hau Ho, Herbert Hoijtink, James Holland Jones, Daniel J Hruschka, Kosuke Imai, Guido Imbens, John P.A. Ioannidis, Minjeong Jeon, Michael Kirchler, David Laibson , John A List, Roderick Little, Arthur Lupia, Edouard Machery, Scott E. Maxwell, Michael McCarthy, Don Moore, Stephen L. Morgan, Marcus Munafo, Shinichi Nakagawa, Brendan Nyhan, Timothy H Parker, Luis Pericchi, Marco Perugini, Jeff Rouder, Judith Rousseau, Victoria Savalei, Felix D. Schonbrodt, Thomas Sellke, Betsy Sinclair, Dustin Tingley, Trisha Van Zandt, Simine Vazire, Duncan J. Watts, Christopher Winship, Robert L. Wolpert, Yu Xie, Cristobal Young, Jonathan Zinman, Valen E. Johnson

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 965

We propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance for claims of new discoveries from 0.05 to 0.005.

Uri Gneezy, John A List, Jeffrey A Livingston, Xiangdong Qin, Sally Sadoff, Yang Xu

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Tests measuring and comparing educational achievement are an important policy tool. We experimentally show that offering students extrinsic incentives to put forth effort on such achievement tests has differential effects across cultures. Offering incentives to U.S. students, who generally perform poorly on assessments, improved performance substantially. In contrast, Shanghai students, who are top performers on assessments, were not affected by incentives. Our findings suggest that in the absence of extrinsic incentives, ranking countries based on low-stakes assessments is problematic because test scores reflect differences in intrinsic motivation to perform well on the test itself, and not just differences in ability.

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

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No abstract available

Dean S Karlan

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Questions remain as to whether results from experimental economics are generalizable to real decisions in nonlaboratory settings. Furthermore, questions persist about whether social capital helps mitigate information asymmetries in credit markets. I examine whether behavior in two laboratory games, Trust and a Public Goods, predicts loan repayments to a Peruvian group-lending microfinance program. Since this program relies on social capital to enforce repayment, this tests the external validity of the games. Individuals identified as "trustworthy" by the Trust Game are indeed less likely to default on their loans. No similar support is found for the game's identification of "trusting" individuals.

Frode Alfnes, Maren E Bachke, Mette Wik

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 27

Most charity organizations depend on contributions from the general public, but little research is conducted on donor preferences. Do donors have geographical, recipient, or thematic preferences? We designed a conjoint analysis experiment in which people rated development aid projects by donating money in dictator games. We find that our sample show strong age, gender, regional, and thematic preferences. Furthermore, we find significant differences between segments. The differences in donations are consistent with differences in donors' attitudes toward development aid and their beliefs about differences in poverty and vulnerability of the recipients. The method here used for development projects can easily be adapted to elicit preferences for other kinds of projects that rely on gifts from private donors.

Abigail Barr, Truman G Packard

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 9

Exploiting new data from a survey and behavioral experiment conducted in Peru we analyze individuals' preferences for securing income in old age. We identify a group that is unrationed by the mandate to save in Peru's pension system, and draw insights from their affiliation and contribution behavior. Among the unrationed, those who are more tolerant of risk, have more children, and have a greater share of housing in their accumulated assets are less likely to affiliate and/or contribute to the formal pensions system. Further, the less risk tolerant choose private individual retirement accounts over a publicly administered pension system.

Jonathan E Alevy, Oscar Cristi, Oscar Melo

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Field experiments were conducted with farmers in the Limari Valley of Chile to test extant theory on right-to-choose auctions. Water volumes that differed by reservoir source and time of availability were offered for sale by the research team. The auctions were supplemented by protocols to elicit risk and time preferences of bidders. We find that the right-to-choose auctions raise significantly more revenue than the benchmark sequential auction. Risk attitudes explain a substantial amount of the difference in bidding between auction institutions, consonant with received theory. The auction bidding revealed distinct preferences for water types, which has implications for market re-design.

Werner Guth, Carsten Schmidt, Matthias Sutter

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 17

5,132 readers of the German weekly, Die Zeit, participated in a three-person bargaining experiment. In our data analysis we focus on (1) the influence of age, gender, profession and medium chosen for participation and (2) the external validity of student behaviour (inside and outside the lab). We find that older participants and women care more about equal distributions and that Internet users are more self-regarding than those using mail or fax. Decisions made by students in the lab are rather similar to those made by participants in the newspaper experiment, indicating a high degree of external validity of student data.

Christina M Fong

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 4

This paper reports a surprising finding from an experiment on giving to welfare recipients. The experiment tests how offers of money in n-donor dictator games are affected by 1) donors' humanitarian and egalitarian values and 2) direct information about the recipients' work-preferences. People who are self-reported humanitarians and egalitarians have giving that is highly elastic with respect to the apparent worthiness of the recipient. Among high scoring humanitarian-egalitarians, the median offer to a recipient who appeared industrious was $5.00, while the median offer to a recipient who appeared lazy was only $1.00. Among low scoring humanitarian-egalitarians, the median offer was $1.00 in both conditions. I refer to this combination of altruism and equity/reciprocity as empathic responsiveness. This finding can be rationalized by a model of inequity aversion.

Glenn W Harrison, John A List, Charles Towe

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Does individual behavior in a laboratory setting provide a reliable indicator of behavior in a naturally occurring setting? We consider this general methodological question in the context of eliciting risk attitudes. The controls that are typically employed in laboratory settings, such as the use of abstract lotteries, could lead subjects to employ behavioral rules that differ from the ones they employ in the field. Because it is field behavior that we are interested in understanding, those controls might be a confound in themselves if they result in differences in behavior. We find that the use of artificial monetary prizes provides a reliable measure of risk attitudes when the natural counterpart outcome has minimal uncertainty, but that it can provide an unreliable measure when the natural counterpart outcome has background risk. Behavior tended to be moderately risk averse when artificial monetary prizes were used or when there was minimal uncertainty in the natural nonmonetary outcome, but subjects drawn from the same population were much more risk averse when their attitudes were elicited using the natural nonmonetary outcome that had some background risk. These results are consistent with conventional expected utility theory for the effects of background risk on attitudes to risk.

Alessandra Cassar, Lucas Crowley, Bruce Wydick

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An important question to microfinance is the relevance of existing social capital in target communities to the performance of group lending. This research presents evidence from field experiments in South Africa and Armenia, in which subjects participate in trust games and a microfinance game. We present moderately strong evidence that personal trust between group members and peer homogeneity are more important to group loan repayment than general societal trust or mere acquaintanceship between members. We also find some evidence of reciprocity in groups: those who have been helped by other members are more likely to contribute themselves.

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.

Richard Engelbrecht-Wiggans, John A List, David H Reiley

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 4

My coauthors and I reply to the comments of Daniel Levin on our paper "Demand Reduction in Multiunit Auctions: Evidence from a Sportscard Field Experiment." In his comment, Levin presents new theory and proposes a new equilibrium to explain annomalies reported in our earlier sportscard auction, such as higher first-unit bids under the uniform-price institution. We evaluate his theory and equilibrium in the context of both uniform-price and Vickrey auctions and point out our concerns. Where possible, we attempt to test the predictions of his theory with our existing data.

Erwin Bulte, Simon Levin , John A List, Steven Pacala

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n/a

Glenn W Harrison, Steven J Humphrey, Arjan Verschoor

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We review experimental evidence collected from risky choice experiments using poor subjects in Ethiopia, India and Uganda. Using these data we estimate that just over 50% of our sample behaves in accordance with expected utility theory and that the rest subjectively weight probability according to prospect theory. Our results show that inferences about risk aversion are robust to whichever model we adopt when we estimate each model separately. However, when we allow both models to explain portions of the data simultaneously, we infer risk aversion for subjects behaving according to expected utility theory and risk seeking behavior for subjects behaving according to prospect theory. We conclude that the current practice of designing policies under the assumption that one or other explains all behavior is fundamentally flawed.