Papers - All

Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 6

Intestinal helminths - including hookworm, roundworm, schistosomiasis, and whipworm - infect more than one-quarter of the world's population. A randomized evaluation of a project in Kenya suggests that school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs reduced school absenteeism in treatment schools by one quarter; gains are especially large among the youngest children. Deworming is found to be cheaper than alternative ways of boosting school participation. By reducing disease transmission, deworming creates substantial externality health and school participation benefits among untreated children in the treatment schools and among children in neighboring schools. These externalities are large enough to justify fully subsidizing treatment. We do not find evidence that deworming improves academic test scores. Existing experimental studies, in which treatment is randomized among individuals in the same school, find small and insignificant deworming treatment effects on education; however, these studies underestimate true treatment effects if deworming creates positive externalities for the control group and reduces treatment group attrition.

John A List

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 6

Walrasian tatonnement has been a fundamental assumption in economics ever since Walras' general equilibrium theory was introduced in 1874. Nearly a century after its introduction, Vernon Smith relaxed the Walrasian tatonnement assumption by showing that neoclassical competitive market theory explains the equilibrating forces in ""double- auction"" markets. I make a next step in this evolution by exploring the predictive power of neoclassical theory in decentralized naturally occurring markets. Using data gathered from two distinct markets--the sports card and collector pin markets--I find a tendency for exchange prices to approach the neoclassical competitive model prediction after a few market periods.

Justin Krieg, Anya Samek

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 6

What happens when charities compete? We begin to answer this question through a laboratory experiment in which subjects play two public goods games simultaneously. We systematically vary the incentives for contributing in one of the games - investigating the effects of recognition, a bonus conditional on contributing, and non-monetary sanctions - and measure the effect on contributions in both games. Monetary incentives in the form of conditional bonuses increase contributions, even when two games are played simultaneously. However, non-monetary incentives such as recognition and sanctions are less effective than in related literature on games played in isolation. Moreover, we find mixed evidence of the spillover effect of treatment on the un-treated games - bonuses increase contributions initially, recognition decreases contributions, and sanctions have no effect.

Paul Dolan, Robert D Metcalfe

Cited by*: 8 Downloads*: 6

There is increasing research on the exogenous impact of descriptive social norms on economic behavior. The research to date has a number of limitations: 1) it has not de-coupled the impact of the norm and the knowledge required to understand how to change behavior based upon it; 2) it has exclusively used offline but not online (i.e. emails) methods; and 3) it has not understood the impact of financial incentives in conjunction with norms. We address these three limitations using two natural field experiments. We find, firstly, that norms change energy behavior over a 15 month treatment period irrespective of whether information is provided or not. We find that social norms reduce consumption by around 6% (0.2 standard deviations). Norms have has their largest impact on the day that information on the social norm is received, and then decreases over time. Secondly, we do not find that social norms work online (even with experienced consumers who are used to online billing) - social norms de- livered online may have very little beneficial effects on reducing energy use. Thirdly, we find that large financial rewards work very well online in reducing consumption, with a 0.35 change in energy consumption over a four month period. Perhaps most interestingly, we find that the large effect of financial incentives is completely removed when information on social norms is added online.

Joshua D Clinton, John S Lapinski

Cited by*: 6 Downloads*: 6

Scholars disagree whether negative advertising demobilizes or stimulates the electorate. We use an experiment with over 10,200 eligible voters to evaluate the two leading hypotheses of negative political advertising. We extend the analysis to examine whether advertising differentially impacts the turnout of voter subpopulations depending on the advertisement's message. In the short term, we find no evidence that exposure to negative advertisements decreases turnout and little that suggests it increases turnout. Any effect appears to depend upon the message of the advertisement and the characteristics of the viewer. In the long term, we find little evidence that the information contained in the treatment groups' advertisements is sufficient to systematically alter turnout.

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.

Tim Jeppesen, John A List, Daan van Soest

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 6

Empirical tests of the relationship between international competitiveness and the severity of environmental regulations are hampered by the lack of pollution abatement cost data for non-U.S. countries. The theory of the firm suggests that environmental stringency can be measured by the difference between a polluting input's shadow price and its market price. We make a first attempt at quantifying such a measure for two industries located in nine European OECD countries. Overall, we provide (i) a new approach to measure cross-country regulatory differences in that we use a theoretically attractive measure of industry-specific private compliance cost, and (ii) empirical estimates that are an attractive tool for researchers and policymakers who are interested in examining how economic activity is influenced by compliance costs.

Macartan Humphreys, William Masters, Martin Sandbu

Cited by*: 6 Downloads*: 6

Despite a widespread trend towards the adoption of increasingly participatory approaches to political decision-making in developing countries there is little or no evidence that these practices in fact return the benefits attributed to them. We present an empirical investigation into one specific worry-that participatory decision processes may be vulnerable to manipulation by elites. We report on a field experiment on the effects of leaders, drawing on a unique nationwide experiment in democratic deliberation in Sao Tome and Principe. In these deliberations, meetings were moderated by discussion leaders who were randomly assigned to run meetings around the country. The randomization procedure provides a rare opportunity to identify the impact of leaders on the outcomes of group deliberations. We find that leadership effects were extremely large, in many cases accounting for over one third of all variation in the outcomes of the national discussions. These results have important implications for the design of such deliberative practices. While the total effect of leadership cannot be assessed, it is possible to observe leadership effects and to correct for variation in outcomes of meetings.

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.

Glenn W Harrison, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 6

No abstract available

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.

Matthew McCarter, Anya Samek, Roman Sheremeta

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 5

It is common in organizational life to be simultaneously involved in multiple collective actions. These collective actions may be modeled using public good dilemmas. The developing social dilemma literature has two perspectives - the "divided loyalties" and "conditional cooperation" perspectives - that give opposite predictions about how individuals will behave when they simultaneously play two identical public good games. The current paper creates consensus between these social dilemma perspectives by examining cooperative behavior of participants interacting in two public good games with either different or the same group members. In each round, individuals have a common budget constraint across the two games. In support of the conditional cooperator's perspective of social dilemmas, we find that playing two games with different, rather than same, group members increases overall contributions. Over the course of the experiment, participants playing two games with different group members shift their contributions significantly more often toward more cooperative public good games than participants playing with the same group members.

Charles Bellemare, Sabine Kroger

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

This paper analyzes data for a random sample drawn from the Dutch population who reveal their capacity to provide and sustain social capital by their propensity to invest and reward investments by means of an economic experiment. We have three main results. First, we find that heterogeneity in behavior is characterized by several asymmetries men, the young and elderly, and low educated individuals invest relatively less, but reward significantly more investments. Second, higher expected levels of investments have a positive and significant effect on the level of investments themselves, corroborating the presence of social norms. Third, we compare our results with a laboratory experiment conducted with a student sample. We find that the student sample provides a lower bound of the population level of social capital.

John A List, Jason F Shogren, Michael Spencer , Stephen Swallow

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

This paper considers how six alternative rebate rules affect voluntary contributions in a threshold public-good experiment. The rules differ by (1) whether an individual can receive a proportional rebate of excess contributions, a winner-takes-all of any excess contributions, or a full rebate of one's contribution in the event the public good is provided and excess contributions exist, and (2) whether the probability of receiving a rebate is proportional to an individual's contribution relative to total contributions or is a simple uniform probability distribution set by the number of contributors. The paper adds to the existing experimental economics literature on threshold public goods by investigating both aggregate and individual demand revelation under the winner-take-all and random full-rebate rules. Half of the rules (proportional rebate, winner-take-all with uniform probability among all group members, and random full-rebate with uniform probability) provide total contributions that nearly equal total benefits, while the rest (winner-take-all with proportional probability, winner-take-all with uniform probability among contributors only, and random full-rebate with proportional probability) exceed benefits by over 30 percent. Only the proportional rebate rule is found to achieve both aggregate and individual demand revelation. Our experimental results have implications for both fundraisers and valuation practitioners.

Uri Gneezy, Kenneth Leonard, John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

This study uses a controlled experiment to explore whether there are gender differences in selecting into competitive environments across two distinct societies: the Maasai in Tanzania and the Khasi in India. One unique aspect of these societies is that the Maasai represent a textbook example of a patriarchal society whereas the Khasi are matrilineal. Similar to the extant evidence drawn from experiments executed in Western cultures, Maasai men opt to compete at roughly twice the rate as Maasai women. Interestingly, this result is reversed amongst the Khasi, where women choose the competitive environment more often than Khasi men, and even choose to compete weakly more often than Maasai men. We view these results as potentially providing insights into the underpinnings of the factors hypothesized to be determinants of the observed gender differences in selecting into competitive environments.

Michael J. Seiler

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

We test the disjunctive hypothesis as it relates to mortgage contracts and find that a liquidated damages clause shifts one's view of a mortgage from a promise to perform to either a promise to perform or pay compensatory damages. However, when a strategic mortgage default is responsible for the breach, the perceived immorality of this action overwhelms the liquidated damages clause effect in support of the disjunctive thesis. We also find that people's conscious "experimentally stated preference" moral stance on installment loan (mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt and even cell phone contracts) default significantly differs from their subconscious "experimentally revealed preference" moral stance indicating a difference between what people say they believe and what they actually believe.

Matthew Cypher, S McKay Price, Spenser Robinson, Michael J. Seiler

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

Using a sample of CCIM designees and candidates in an experimental setting, this study examines the impact of broker signaling in commercial real estate transactions. It also explores the effect of certainty of closure in commercial real estate transactions. Findings suggest brokers are able to influence transaction pricing. Moreover, detailed analysis reveals that when a signal is above a reference point implied by previous transactions, the strength of the signal matters; privately communicated signals from reliable sources have significantly greater impact than signals which are made widely available. Additionally, we find an approximately 10% premium in transactions with lower certainty of closure than one with high certainty. The latter result varies by transactional participant type; owner/developers require a larger premium than institutional sellers.

John A List

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 5

Several experimental studies have recently provided strong evidence that the basic independence assumption, which is used in most theoretical and applied economic models to assess the operation of markets, is rarely appropriate. These results, which clearly contradict closely held economic doctrines, have led some influential commentators to call for an entirely new economic paradigm to displace conventional neoclassical theory. This paper refutes the generality of these experimental findings by going to a well-functioning marketplace and examining more than 350 individual decisions across various incentive compatible elicitation mechanisms. The data suggest that individuals with significant marketlike experience behave largely in accordance with neoclassical predictions: any observed WTA/WTP disparity amongst this group can be explained by neoclassical arguments. In light of these findings, I believe that we have discarded neoclassical explanations of the value disparity too quickly. More narrowly, these empirical results have important implications for stated valuation methods, such as contingent valuation.

John A List, David Lucking-Reiley

Cited by*: 40 Downloads*: 5

No abstract available

Catherine Kling , John A List, Jinhua Zhao

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 5

Recent evidence from laboratory experiments suggests that important disparities exist between willingness to pay (WTP) and compensation demanded for the same good. Because a fundamental postulate in neoclassical theory is that with small income effects and many available substitutes, the willingness to accept (WTA) and WTP measures of value for a commodity should be roughly equivalent, this finding has vast implications in both a positive and normative sense. This study advances, and experimentally tests, a new explanation of the WTP/WTA disparity-a dynamic theory based on the presence of commitment costs. Although to date neoclassical models have not explained the observed data patterns well, we find that the commitment cost theory combined with a simple behavioral anomaly is able to lend insights into the causes and severity of the WTA/WTP disparity. Furthermore, we find that market experience attenuates the behavioral anomaly, consistent with the notion that no value disparity exists for agents with sufficient market experience.