Papers - Artefactual

Uri Gneezy, Moshe Hoffman, Mark A. Lane, John A List, Jeffrey A Livingston, Michael J. Seiler

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Recent theoretical work shows that the better-than-average effect, where a majority believes their ability to be better than average, can be perfectly consistent with Bayesian updating. However, later experiments that account for this theoretical advance still find behavior consistent with overconfidence. The literature notes that overoptimism can be caused by either overconfidence (optimism about performance), wishful thinking (optimism about outcomes), or both. To test whether the better-than-average effect might be explained by wishful thinking instead of overconfidence, we conduct an experiment that is similar to those used in the overconfidence literature, but removes performance as a potential channel. We find evidence that wishful thinking might explain overconfidence only among the most optimistic subjects, and that conservatism is possibly more of a worry; if unaccounted for, overconfidence might be underestimated.

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

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Letter in Science Magazine

Omar Al-Ubaydli, John A. List

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The A/B testing approach invites promising early results that are unlikely to be realized in a larger setting. We argue that within the social sciences, a fundamentally different approach is needed; we call it option C thinking. Put simply, a twenty-first-century team of civil servants and social scientists should lead with experiments that anticipate likely causes of failure at scale, even if doing so requires more time, effort, and resources initially.

Omar Al-Ubaydli, Jason Chien-Yu, John A List

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The "voltage effect" is defined as the tendency for a program's efficacy to change when it is scaled up, which in most cases results in the absolute size of a program's treatment effects to diminish when the program is scaled. Understanding the scaling problem and taking steps to diminish voltage drops are important because if left unaddressed, the scaling problem can weaken the public's faith in science, and it can lead to a misallocation of public resources. There exists a growing literature illustrating the prevalence of the scaling problem, explaining its causes, and proposing countermeasures. This paper adds to the literature by providing a simple model of the scaling problem that is consistent with rational expectations by the key stakeholders. Our model highlights that asymmetric information is a key contributor to the voltage effect.

Omar Al-Ubaydli, John A List, Claire Mackevicius, Min Sok Lee, Dana L Suskind

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Policymakers are increasingly turning to insights gained from the experimental method as a means to inform large scale public policies. Critics view this increased usage as premature, pointing to the fact that many experimentally-tested programs fail to deliver their promise at scale. Under this view, the experimental approach drives too much public policy. Yet, if policymakers could be more confident that the original research findings would be delivered at scale, even the staunchest critics would carve out a larger role for experiments to inform policy. Leveraging the economic framework of Al-Ubaydli et al. (2019), we put forward 12 simple proposals, spanning researchers, policymakers, funders, and stakeholders, which together tackle the most vexing scalability threats. The framework highlights that only after we deepen our understanding of the scale up problem will we be on solid ground to argue that scientific experiments should hold a more prominent place in the policymaker's quiver.

Ori Heffetz, John A List

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Carefully designed scientific experiments have been an engine of economic, technological, and social progress for well over a century, which is why the public generally trusts such methods. Unfortunately, governments around the world still routinely oppose controlled trials of public policies.

Eszter Czibor, David Jimenez-Gomez, John A List

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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.

Rocco Caferra, Alessia Casamassima, Alessandro Cascavilla, Andrea Morone, Paola Tiranzoni

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This work aims to identify and quantify the biases behind the anomalous behavior of people when they deal with the Three Doors dilemma, which is a really simple but counterintuitive game. Carrying out an artefactual field experiment and proposing eight different treatments to isolate the anomalies, we provide new interesting experimental evidence on the reasons why subjects fail to take the optimal decision. According to the experimental results, we can quantify the size and the impact of three main biases that explain the anomalous behavior of participants: Bayesian updating, illusion of control, and status quo bias.

John A List, Ragan Petrie, Anya Samek

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In the past several decades the experimental method has lent deep insights into economics. One surprising area that has contributed is the experimental study of children, where advances as varied as the evolution of human behaviors that shape markets and institutions to how early life influences shape later life outcomes have been explored. We first develop a framework for economic preference measurement that provides a lens into how to interpret data from experiments with children. Next, we survey work that provides general empirical insights within our framework. Finally, we provide 10 tips for pulling off experiments with children, including factors such as taking into account child competencies, causal identification, and logistical issues related to recruitment and implementation. We envision the experimental study of children as a high growth research area in the coming decades as social scientists begin to more fully appreciate that children are active participants in markets who (might) respond predictably to economic incentives.

Wojciech Hardy, Michal Krawczyk, Joanna Tyrowicz

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We report results of an experimental study analyzing the effects of Internet piracy on book sales. We conducted a year-long controlled large-scale field experiment with pre-treatment pair matching. Half of the book titles received experiment treatment, in which a specialized agency would immediately remove any unauthorized copy appearing on the Internet. For the other half we merely registered such occurrences, but no countermeasures were taken. For all the titles we obtained print and e-book sales statistics from the publishers. We find that removal of unauthorized copies was an effective method of curbing piracy, but this had no bearing on legal sales.

Annika List, John A List, Anya Samek

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Social scientists for years have documented the pervasiveness of discrimination in product and labor markets. While the literature has recently attempted to measure the nature of such discrimination, much less work has been done exploring the origins of discrimination. We make a modest step in this direction by reporting data from a field experiment attempting to measure discrimination amongst 3-5 years olds. Using a design that isolated discriminatory behaviors in economic games, we find that both White and Hispanic children send more resources to Black children than White children, whereas black children send equal amounts. This provides a first glimpse that suggests preferences amongst the young do not show similar patterns as preferences of adults.

Greta List, John A List, Lina Ramirez, Anya Samek

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We conduct experiments with 720 children ages 9-11 to evaluate the relationship of time and risk preferences with health. Children who are more patient report consuming fewer unhealthy calories and spending less time on sedentary activities such as video games. Children who are more risk seeking report engaging in more exercise and more screen time. However, time and risk preferences are not predictive of body mass index (BMI). Moreover, some of the negative health behaviors, such as screen time, are associated with lower - rather than higher - BMI.

Isabelle Brocas, Juan D Carrillo

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Adults do not play the Nash equilibrium in the well known centipede game. While Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2009) argued that behavior results from the failure of backward induction logic, Levitt et al. (2011) found that players who know how to backward induct still do not play Nash. Here, we ask children and adolescents (ages 8 to 16) to play the centipede game in the laboratory and we leverage knowledge about developing abilities to assess the contribution of backward induction logic. In line with the literature, we find that the ability to perform backward induction increases with age. However, it predicts behavior only in elementary school children: those with advanced logical abilities over-apply their skills. Starting in middle school, students who reason logically know that the unraveling argument should not be applied blindly. They utilize Theory-of-Mind (ToM) abilities to form beliefs about others' play and (optimally) refrain from stopping immediately. Their behavior is in line with the deviations observed in adults. Interestingly, developing ToM leads to a gradual decrease in stopping stages with age, which is accompanied by a decrease in payoffs with age. The results indicate that ToM is the key contributor of behavior that helps departing from backward induction when beneficial.

John A List

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ASSA 2023 presentation

Greg Allenby, Russell Belk, Catherine Eckel, Robert Fisher, Ernan Haruvy, John A List, Yu Ma, Peter Popkowski Leszczyc, Yu Wang, Sherry Xin Li

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We offer a unified conceptual, behavioral, and econometric framework for optimal fundraising that deals with both synergies and discrepancies between approaches from economics, consumer behavior, and sociology. The purpose is to offer a framework that can bridge differences and open a dialogue between disciplines in order to facilitate optimal fundraising design. The literature is extensive, and our purpose is to offer a brief background and perspective on each of the approaches, provide an integrated framework leading to new insights, and discuss areas of future research.

Snigdha Gupta, John A List, Lauren Supplee, Dana L Suskind

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Failed to Scale: Embracing the Challenge of Scaling in Early Childhood

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

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Policymakers are increasingly turning to insights gained from the experimental method as a means of informing public policies. Whether-and to what extent-insights from a research study scale to the level of the broader public is, in many situations, based on blind faith. This scale-up problem can lead to a vast waste of resources, a missed opportunity to improve people's lives, and a diminution in the public's trust in the scientific method's ability to contribute to policymaking. This study provides a theoretical lens to deepen our understanding of the science of how to use science. Through a simple model, we highlight three elements of the scale-up problem: (1) when does evidence become actionable (appropriate statistical inference); (2) properties of the population; and (3) properties of the situation. We argue that until these three areas are fully understood and recognized by researchers and policymakers, the threats to scalability will render any scaling exercise as particularly vulnerable. In this way, our work represents a challenge to empiricists to estimate the nature and extent of how important the various threats to scalability are in practice, and to implement those in their original research.

John A List

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While empirical economics has made important strides over the past half century, there is a recent attack that threatens the foundations of the empirical approach in economics: external validity. Certain dogmatic arguments are not new, yet in some circles the generalizability question is beyond dispute, rendering empirical work as a passive enterprise based on frivolity. Such arguments serve to caution even the staunchest empirical advocates from even starting an empirical inquiry in a novel setting. In its simplest form, questions of external validity revolve around whether the results of the received study can be generalized to different people, situations, stimuli, and time periods. This study clarifies and places the external validity crisis into perspective by taking a unique glimpse into the grandest of trials: The External Validity Trial. A key outcome of the proceedings is an Author Onus Probandi, which outlines four key areas that every study should report to address external validity. Such an evaluative approach properly rewards empirical advances and justly recognizes inherent empirical limitations.

Syon Bhanot, Jiyoung Han, Chaning Jang

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Restrictions like work requirements and constraints on voucher transfers are often used in social welfare systems, but little empirical evidence exists on their impact on wellbeing. We conducted a 10-day randomized experiment with 432 individuals living below the poverty line in the Kawangware settlement of Nairobi, kenya, testing two elements of social welfare design: workfare versus welfare and restricted versus unrestricted vouchers. Participants were randomly assigned to a "Work" condition, involving daily work for unrestricted vouchers, or one of two "Wait" conditions, involving daily waiting for vouchers that were either unrestricted or partially restricted to staple foods. We find that working improved psychological wellbeing relative to waiting, suggesting that means of implementing welfare programs may have important effects on individuals beyond the impact of monetary benefit alone. Furthermore, although restrictions were inframarginal, partially restricted vouchers crowded-in spending on staple foods, suggesting the existence of a "flypaper effect" in spending from restricted vouchers.

Snigdha Gupta, Maggie C. Kane, John A List, Liz Sablich, Lauren Supplee, Dana L Suskind

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