Papers - All
Eszter Czibor,
David Jimenez-Gomez,
John A List
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None 
What was once broadly viewed as an impossibility - learning from experimental data in economics - has now become commonplace. Governmental bodies, think tanks, and corporations around the world employ teams of experimental researchers to answer their most pressing questions. For their part, in the past two decades academics have begun to more actively partner with organizations to generate data via field experimentation. While this revolution in evidence-based approaches has served to deepen the economic science, recently a credibility crisis has caused even the most ardent experimental proponents to pause. This study takes a step back from the burgeoning experimental literature and introduces 12 actions that might help to alleviate this credibility crisis and raise experimental economics to an even higher level. In this way, we view our "12 action wish list" as discussion points to enrich the field.
Andrew Dustan,
Juan Manuel Hernandez-Agramonte,
Stanislao Maldonado
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
We study how non-monetary incentives, motivated by recent advances in behavioral economics, affect civil servant performance in a context where state capacity is weak. We collaborated with a government agency in Peru to experimentally vary the context of text messages targeted to civil servants in charge of a school maintenance program. These messages incorporated behavioral insights in dimensions related to information provision, social norms, and weak forms of monitoring and auditing. We find that these messages are a very cost-effective strategy to enforce compliance with national policies among civil servants. We further study the role of social norms and the salience of social benefits in a follow-up experiment and explore the external validity or our original results by implementing a related experiment with civil servants from a different national program. The findings of these new experiments support our original results and provide additional insights regarding the context in which these incentives may work. Our results highlight the importance of carefully designed non-monetary incentives as a tool to improve civil servant performance when the state lacks institutional mechanisms to enforce compliance.
Chien-Yu Lai,
John A List,
Anya Samek
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federal food assistance program that serves over 30 million children in the United States annually. Yet the impact of NSLP on nutritional intake may be limited because children frequently do not choose the healthier offerings or waste large portions of their meal. In this article, we study whether we can improve the impact of the NSLP on child food choice through low-cost nudges. We conduct a field experiment in a school lunchroom with 2500 children, evaluating the impact of informational prompts on milk choice and consumption over two weeks. We find that the prompts alone increase the proportion of children choosing and consuming the healthier white milk relative to sugar-sweetened chocolate milk from 20% in the control group to 30% in the treatment groups. Adding health or taste messaging to the prompt does not seem to make a difference. We survey students and find that most prompts affect perceived healthfulness of the milk, but not perceived taste. Finally, we find that the prompts are nearly as effective as a small nonmonetary incentive.
Michal Krawczyk,
Joanna Rachubik
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
The representativeness heuristic (RH) has been proposed to be at the root of several types of biases in judgment. In this project, we ask whether the RH is relevant in two kinds of choices in the context of gambling. Specifically, in a field experiment with naturalistic stimuli and a potentially extremely high monetary pay-out, we give each of our subjects a choice between a lottery ticket with a random-looking number sequence and a ticket with a patterned sequence; we subsequently offer them a small cash bonus if they switch to the other ticket. In the second task, we investigate the gambler's fallacy, asking subjects what they believe the outcome of a fourth coin toss after a sequence of three identical outcomes will be. We find that most subjects prefer "random" sequences, and that approximately half believe in dependence between subsequent coin tosses. There is no correlation, though, between the initial choice of the lottery ticket and the prediction of the coin toss. Nonetheless, subjects who have a strong preference for certain number combinations (i.e., subjects who are willing to forgo the cash bonus and remain with their initial choice) also tend to predict a specific outcome (in particular a reversal, corresponding to the gambler's fallacy) in the coin task.
John A List
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
These are the slides from John A. List's keynote at the 2022 AFE conference.
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.
John A List
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
A summary of artefactual field experiments on fieldexperiments.com.
Omar Al-Ubaydli,
John A List
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
Natural field experiments investigating key labour market phenomena such as unemployment have only been used since the early 2000s. This paper reviews the literature and draws three primary conclusions that deepen our understanding of unemployment. First, the inability to monitor workers perfectly in many occupations complicates the hiring decision in a way that contributes to unemployment. Second, the inability to determine a worker's attributes precisely at the time of hiring leads to discrimination on the basis of factors such as race, gender, age and ethnicity. This can lead to systematically high and persistent levels of unemployment for groups that face discrimination. Third, the importance of social and personal dynamics in the workplace can lead to short-term unemployment. Much of the knowledge necessary for these conclusions could only be obtained using natural field experiments due to their ability to combine randomized control with an absence of experimenter demand effects.
John A List,
Fatemeh Momeni
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
We use a natural field experiment in which we hired over 2000 workers from an online labor market to explore how upfront payment affects worker motivation and misbehavior on the job. We start with a simple theory that shows paying upfront can increase misbehavior through reducing the perceived costs of cheating, but it can decrease misbehavior through generating a gift-exchange effect. Motivated by the theory, we designed a task that provided workers with opportunities to reciprocate or misbehave. A unique aspect of our design is that we are permitted an opportunity to measure the curvature of the gift-exchange value of the upfront payment. Our results suggest paying workers upfront induces a gift-exchange effect that is concave in the share of total wage paid upfront. Moreover, the impact is strong enough to suggest that small upfront payments are a cost-effective means for an employer to curb employee misbehavior.
John A List
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
"Putting Economic Research into Practice at Businesses (to Inform Science and Major Social Challenges)"
Slides from ASSA NABE
Snigdha Gupta,
Maggie C. Kane,
John A List,
Liz Sablich,
Lauren Supplee,
Dana L Suskind
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
Recommendations for Mitigating Threats to Scaling
Maria De Paola,
Rosetta Lombardo,
Valeria Pupo,
Vincenzo Scoppa
Cited by*: None Downloads*: None
Public speaking is an important skill for career prospects and for leadership positions, but many people tend to avoid it because it generates anxiety. We run a field experiment to analyze whether in an incentivized setting men and women show differences in their willingness to speak in public. The experiment involved more than 500 undergraduate students who could gain two points to add to the final grade of their exam by presenting solutions to a problem set. Students were randomly assigned to present only to the instructor or in front of a large audience (a class of 100 or more). We find that while women are more willing to present face-to-face, they are considerably less likely to give a public presentation. Female aversion to public speaking does not depend on differences in ability, risk aversion, self-confidence and self-esteem. The aversion to public speaking greatly reduces for daughters of working women. From data obtained through an on-line Survey we also show that neither increasing the gains deriving from public speaking nor allowing participants more time to prepare enable to close the gender gap.
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
Glenn W Harrison,
John A List
Cited by*: 644 Downloads*: 105
Experimental economists are leaving the reservation. They are recruiting subjects in the field rather than in the classroom, using field goods rather than induced valuations, and using field context rather than abstract terminology in instructions. We argue that there is something methodologically fundamental behind this trend. Field experiments differ from laboratory experiments in many ways. Although it is tempting to view field experiments as simply less controlled variants of laboratory experiments, we argue that to do so would be to seriously mischaracterize them. What passes for "control" in laboratory experiments might in fact be precisely the opposite if it is artificial to the subject or context of the task. We propose six factors that can be used to determine the field context of an experiment: the nature of the subject pool, the nature of the information that the subjects bring to the task, the nature of the commodity, the nature of the task or trading rules applied, the nature of the stakes, and the environment that subjects operate in.
Hans P Binswanger
Cited by*: 412 Downloads*: 122
Attitudes toward risk were measures in 240 households using two methods: an interview method eliciting certainty equivalents and an experimental gambling approach with real payoffs which, at their maximum, exceeded monthly incomes of unskilled laborers. The interview method is subject to interviewer bias and its results were totally inconsistent with the experimental measures of risk aversion. Experimental measures indicate that, at high payoff levels, virtually all individuals are moderately risk-averse with little variation according to personal characteristics. Wealth tends to reduce risk aversion slightly, but its effect is not statistically significant.
Glenn W Harrison,
Morten I Lau,
Elisabet E Rutstrom
Cited by*: 378 Downloads*: 31
We estimate individual risk attitudes using controlled experiments in the field in Denmark. The experiments were carried out across Denmark using a representative sample of 253 people between 19 and 75 years of age. Risk attitudes are estimated for various individuals differentiated by socio-demographic characteristics. Our results indicate that the average Dane is risk averse, and that risk neutrality is an inappropriate assumption to apply. We also find that risk attitudes vary significantly with respect to several important socio-demographic variables such as age and education. However, we do not find any effect of sex on risk attitudes. Copyright The editors of the "Scandinavian Journal of Economics" 2007 .
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.
Steven D Levitt,
John A List
Cited by*: 321 Downloads*: 96
A critical question facing experimental economists is whether behavior inside the laboratory is a good indicator of behavior outside the laboratory. To address that question, we build a model in which the choices that individuals make depend not just on financial implications, but also on the nature and extent of scrutiny by others, the particular context in which a decision is embedded, and the manner in which participants and tasks are selected. We present empirical evidence demonstrating the importance of these various factors. To the extent that lab and naturally occurring environments systematically differ on any of these dimensions, the results obtained inside and outside the lab need not correspond. Focusing on experiments designed to measure social preferences, we discuss the extent to which the existing laboratory results generalize to naturally-occurring markets. We summarize cases where the lab may understate the importance of social preferences as well as instances in which the lab might exaggerate their importance. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of interpreting laboratory and field data through the lens of theory.
Esther Duflo,
Emmanuel Saez
Cited by*: 320 Downloads*: 30
This paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees' decisions to enroll in a Tax Deferred Account (TDA) retirement plan within a large university. The experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benefits information fair organized by the university, by promising a monetary reward for attendance. The experiment multiplied by more than five the attendance rate of these treated individuals (relative to controls), and tripled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated. TDA enrollment five and eleven months after the fair was significantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated. However, the effect on TDA enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did. We provide three interpretations-differential treatment effects, social network effects, and motivational reward effects-to account for these results.
Shlomo Benartzi,
Richard H Thaler
Cited by*: 298 Downloads*: 146
As firms switch from defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans, employees bear more responsibility for making decisions about how much to save. The employees who fail to join the plan or who participate at a very low level appear to be saving at less than the predicted life cycle savings rates. Behavioral explanations for this behavior stress bounded rationality and self-control and suggest that at least some of the low-saving households are making a mistake and would welcome aid in making decisions about their saving. In this paper, we propose such a prescriptive savings program, called Save More Tomorrow (hereafter, the SMarT program). The essence of the program is straightforward: people commit in advance to allocating a portion of their future salary increases toward retirement savings. We report evidence on the first three implementations of the SMarT program. Our key findings, from the first implementation, which has been in place for four annual raises, are as follows: (1) a high proportion (78 percent) of those offered the plan joined, (2) the vast majority of those enrolled in the SMarT plan (80 percent) remained in it through the fourth pay raise, and (3) the average saving rates for SMarT program participants increased from 3.5 percent to 13.6 percent over the course of 40 months. The results suggest that behavioral economics can be used to design effective prescriptive programs for important economic decisions.