Papers - All

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

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 87

No abstract available

Simon Gachter, Henrik Orzen, Elke Renner, Chris Starmer

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 87

An extensive literature demonstrates the existence of framing effects in the laboratory and in questionnaire studies. This paper reports new evidence from a natural field experiment using a subject pool one might expect to be particularly resistant to such effects: experimental economists. We find that while the behaviour of junior experimental economists is affected by the description of the decision task they face, this is not the case for the more senior members of our subject pool.

John A List

Cited by*: 120 Downloads*: 86

Empirical studies have provided evidence that discrimination exists in various markets, but they rarely allow the analyst to draw conclusions concerning the nature of discrimination. By combining data from bilateral negotiations in the sportscard market with complementary field experiments, this study provides a framework that amends this shortcoming. The experimental design, which includes data gathered from more than 1100 market participants, provides sharp findings: (i) there is a strong tendency for minorities to receive initial and final offers that are inferior to those received by majorities, and (ii) overall, the data indicate that the observed discrimination is not due to animus, but represents statistical discrimination.

Jeffrey A Flory, Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 85

Workplace misbehaviors are often governed by explicit monitoring and strict punishment. Such enforcement activities can serve to lessen worker productivity and harm worker morale. We take a different approach to curbing worker misbehavior-bonuses. Examining more than 6500 donor phone calls across more than 80 workers, we use a natural field experiment to investigate how different wage contracts influence workers' propensity to break workplace rules in harmful ways. Our findings show that even though standard relative performance pay contracts, relative to a fixed wage scheme, increase productivity, they have a dark side: they cause considerable cheating and sabotage of co-workers. Yet, even in such environments, by including an unexpected bonus, the employer can substantially curb worker misbehavior. In this manner, our findings reveal how employers can effectively leverage bonuses to eliminate undesired behaviors induced by performance pay contracts.

Andreas Leibbrandt, Redzo Mujcic

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 85

Some of the greatest human achievements are difficult to imagine without pro-sociality. This paper employs a natural field experiment to investigate indirect reciprocity in natural social interactions. We find strong evidence of indirect reciprocity in one-shot interactions among drivers. Subjects for whom other drivers stopped were more than twice as likely to extend a similar act to a third party. This result is robust to a number of factors including age, gender, social status, presence of onlookers, and the opportunity cost of time. We provide novel evidence for the power of indirect reciprocity to promote prosocial behavior in the field.

John A List, David H Reiley

Cited by*: 142 Downloads*: 82

Field experiments have grown significantly in prominence over the past decade. In this essay, we provide a summary of the major types of field experiments, explore their uses, and describe a few examples. We show how field experiments can be used for both positive and normative purposes within economics. We also discuss more generally why data collection is useful in science, and more narrowly discuss the question of generalizability. In this regard, we envision field experiments playing a classic role in helping investigators learn about the behavioral principles that are shared across different domains.

Michael Hallsworth, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe, Ivo Vlaev

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 82

Framing remains one of the pillars of behavioral economics. While framing effects have been found to be quite important in the lab, what is less clear is how well evidence drawn from naturally-occurring settings conforms to received laboratory insights. We use debt obligation to the UK government as a case study to explore the 'omission bias' present in decision making with large stakes. Using a natural field experiment that generates nearly 40,000 observations, we find that repayment rates are roughly doubled when the act is reframed as one of commission rather than omission. We estimate that this reframing of the perceived nature of the action generated over $1.3 million of new yield. We find evidence that this behavior may result from a deliberate 'omission strategy', rather than a behavioral bias, as is often assumed in the literature. Our natural field experiment highlights that behavioral economics is much more than a series of empirical exercises to quench the intellectual curiosity of academics.

John A List, Fatemeh Momeni

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 82

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a cornerstone of modern business practice, developing from a "why" in the 1960s to a "must" today. Early empirical evidence on both the demand and supply sides has largely confirmed CSR's efficacy. This paper combines theory with a large-scale natural field experiment to connect CSR to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than 3,000 workers, we find that our usage of CSR increases employee misbehavior - 20% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duty when we introduce CSR. Complementary treatments suggest that "moral licensing" is at work, in that the "doing good" nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that hurts the firm. In this way, our data highlight a potential dark cloud of CSR, and serve to forewarn that such business practices should not be blindly applied.

Shachar Kariv, Daniel J. Lee, John A List, Michael K Price

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 82

We build on previous work in the charitable giving literature by examining not only how much subjects give to charity, but also which charities subjects prefer. We operationalize this choice in an artefactual field experiment with a representative sample of respondents. We then use these data to structurally model motives for giving. The novelty of this design allows us to ask several interesting questions regarding the choices one undertakes when deciding both whether and how much to give to charity. Further, we ask these questions in the context of a standard utility framework. Given the unique set up of this experiment, we also explore how these distributional preference parameters differ by charity choice and from what we have observed in the past. We find that there is more variation within demographics and charity types than across distributions.

Uri Gneezy, Aldo Rustichini

Cited by*: 287 Downloads*: 81

The deterrence hypothesis predicts that the introduction of a penalty that leaves everything else unchanged will reduce the occurrence of the behavior subject to the fine. We present the result of a field study in a group of day-care centers that contradicts this prediction. Parents used to arrive late to collect their children, forcing a teacher to stay after closing time. We introduced a monetary fine for late-coming parents. As a result, the number of late-coming parents increased significantly. After the fine was removed no reduction occurred. We argue that penalties are usually introduced into an incomplete contract, social or private. They may change the information that agents have, and therefore the effect on behavior may be opposite of that expected. If this is true, the deterrence hypothesis loses its predictive strength, since the clause "everything else is left unchanged" might be hard to satisfy.

Peter Bohm

Cited by*: 96 Downloads*: 80

The purpose of this paper is to describe a test involving five different approaches to estimating the demand for a public good. The test was conducted in a setting which permitted a real collective choice and in which each subject was committed to actual payments when relevant. The results indicate that the well-known risk for misrepresentation of preferences in this context may have been exaggerated. The test would seem to encourage further work in the field of experimental economics.

Jayson L Lusk, Ted C Schroeder

Cited by*: 125 Downloads*: 80

This study compares hypothetical and nonhypothetical responses to choice experiment questions. We test for hypothetical bias in a choice experiment involving beef ribeye steaks with differing quality attributes. In general, hypothetical responses predicted higher probabilities of purchasing beef steaks than nonhypothetical resposnes. Thus, hypothetical choices overestimate total willingness-to-pay for beef steaks. However, marginal willingness-to-pay for a change in steak quality is, in general, not statistically different across hypothetical and actual payment settings.

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.

Richard C Bishop, Kevin J Boyle, Richard T Carson, David Chapman, Matthew DeBell, Colleen Donovan, W. Michael Hanemann, Barbara Kanninen, Matthew Konopka, Raymond J Kopp, Jon A Krosnick, John A List, Norman Meade, Robert Paterson, Stanley Presser, Nora Scherer, V. Kerry Smith, Roger Tourangeau, Michael Welsh, Jeffrey M Wooldridge

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 78

No abstract available

John A List

Cited by*: 11 Downloads*: 77

This special issue highlights an empirical approach that has increasingly grown in prominence in the last decade--field experiments. While field experiments can be used quite generally in economics to test theories' predictions, to measure key parameters, and to provide insights into the generalizability of empirical results, this special issue focuses on using field experiments to explore questions within the economics of charity. The issue contains six distinct field experimental studies that investigate various aspects associated with the economics of charitable giving. The issue also includes a fitting tribute to one of the earliest experimenters to depart from traditional lab methods, Peter Bohm, who curiously has not received deep credit or broad acclaim. Hopefully this issue will begin to rectify this oversight.

Loukas Balafoutas, Nikos Nikiforakis

Cited by*: 22 Downloads*: 77

Extensive evidence from laboratory experiments indicates that many individuals are willing to use costly punishment to enforce social norms, even in one-shot interactions. However, there appears to be little evidence in the literature of such behavior in the field. We study the propensity to punish norm violators in a natural field experiment conducted in the main subway station in Athens, Greece. The large number of passengers ensures that strategic motives for punishing are minimized. We study violations of two distinct efficiency enhancing social norms. In line with laboratory evidence, we find that individuals punish norm violators. However, these individuals are a minority. Men are more likely than women to punish violators, while the decision to punish is unaffected by the violator's height and gender. Interestingly, we find that violations of the better known of the two norms are substantially less likely to trigger punishment. We present additional evidence from two surveys providing insights into the determinants of norm enforcement.

Eszter Czibor, Sander Onderstal, Randolph Sloof, Mirjam van Praag

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 76

We conduct a framed field experiment in a Dutch university to compare student effort provision and exam performance under the two most prevalent evaluation practices: absolute (criterion-referenced) and relative (norm-referenced) grading. Based on the empirical stylized fact of gender differences in competitiveness we hypothesize that the rank-order tournament created by relative grading will increase male, but not female, performance. Contrary to our expectations, we find no impact of competitive grading on preparation behavior or exam scores among either gender. Our result may be attributed to the low value students in our sample attach to academic excellence.

David H Herberich, Steven D Levitt, John A List

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 74

No abstract available

Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 7 Downloads*: 74

One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job-seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the nature of sorting and the extent of salary negotiations. We observe interesting data patterns. For example, we find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, this difference disappears, and even tends to reverse. In terms of sorting, we find that men in contrast to women prefer job environments where the 'rules of wage determination' are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous.

Jeff P Carpenter, Glenn W Harrison, John A List

Cited by*: 16 Downloads*: 73

No abstract available