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on Experimental Economics |
| By: | Bhan, Prateek Chandra; Vornberger, Judith; Wen, Jinglin |
| Abstract: | Despite increasing mental health problems and an existing care gap among university students, cost-effective solutions to bridge this gap are still lacking. Using a reflection intervention, we conduct a randomized controlled trial with undergraduate students in Germany. As part of a thought experiment, the treatment group reflected for ten minutes on questions related to stressors and their remedies. Combining survey and administrative data we find a significant improvement in students' mindful behavior, mental health and well-being as well as perseverance in performance. Our results show the self-empowering potential of a low-cost soft-touch intervention in students to aid their mindful behavior, mental health and well-being as well as performance and thus demonstrate one way universities as institutions can provide support. |
| Keywords: | Mental health, students, experiment, stress, coping strategy, Germany |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cexwps:301857 |
| By: | Carlotta Nani (Geneva Graduate Institute) |
| Abstract: | Is it possible to improve women's agency by providing information about their abilities? Using a lab experiment in the field, I study how perceived abilities and gender stereotypes shape intra-household dynamics. I use an incentivized decision-making game with 525 married couples from 42 rural villages in Bangladesh to investigate whether women are discriminated against because they are perceived to be less skilled than their husband, and whether it is possible to reduce this gender bias within households. During the game, I provide information on women's abilities and I observe how beliefs and decisions change. The empirical analysis shows that the less capable women are perceived compared to men, the less they are involved in decisionmaking. After the information treatment, husbands with the lowest regard for their wife's skills are 20 percent more likely to make allocations in her favour. The treatment has a larger impact on younger couples, on men with stronger control preferences and on risk-averse women. This brings further evidence of the inability of spouses to observe each other's skills. Two weeks after the experiment, women in treated couples report being more involved in household decisions. These results suggest that gender discrimination within households has a statistical component that can be corrected by increasing skills' observability. |
| Keywords: | Bangladesh, field experiment, gender discrimination, intra-household dynamics |
| JEL: | D82 D83 D91 J12 J16 |
| Date: | 2024–09–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gii:giihei:heidwp19-2024 |
| By: | Jinglong Zhao |
| Abstract: | The study of experimental design offers tremendous benefits for answering causal questions across a wide range of applications, including agricultural experiments, clinical trials, industrial experiments, social experiments, and digital experiments. Although valuable in such applications, the costs of experiments often drive experimenters to seek more efficient designs. Recently, experimenters have started to examine such efficiency questions from an optimization perspective, as experimental design problems are fundamentally decision-making problems. This perspective offers a lot of flexibility in leveraging various existing optimization tools to study experimental design problems. This manuscript thus aims to examine the foundations of experimental design problems in the context of causal inference as viewed through an optimization lens. |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2408.09607 |
| By: | Anna Becker (Stockholm University); Steffen Huck (University College London and WZB Berlin) |
| Abstract: | We study the relationship between moral values (“ought” statements) and factual beliefs (“is” statements). We show that thinking about values affects the beliefs people hold. This effect is mediated by prior political leanings, thereby contributing to the polarization of factual beliefs. We document these findings in a pre-registered online experiment with a nationally representative sample of over 1, 800 individuals in the US. We also show that participants do not distort their beliefs in response to financial incentives to do so, suggesting that deep values exert a stronger motivational force than financial incentives. |
| Keywords: | motivated beliefs; values; polarization; experiment; reasoning; |
| JEL: | C90 D72 D74 D83 P16 |
| Date: | 2024–09–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rco:dpaper:510 |
| By: | Carol Liu |
| Abstract: | Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have long been the gold standard for causal inference across various fields, including business analysis, economic studies, sociology, clinical research, and network learning. The primary advantage of RCTs over observational studies lies in their ability to significantly reduce noise from individual variance. However, RCTs depend on strong assumptions, such as group independence, time independence, and group randomness, which are not always feasible in real-world applications. Traditional inferential methods, including analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), often fail when these assumptions do not hold. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named \textbf{Sp}ill\textbf{o}ve\textbf{r} \textbf{T}ime \textbf{S}eries \textbf{Causal} (\verb+SPORTSCausal+), which enables the estimation of treatment effects without relying on these stringent assumptions. We demonstrate the practical applicability of \verb+SPORTSCausal+ through a real-world budget-control experiment. In this experiment, data was collected from both a 5\% live experiment and a 50\% live experiment using the same treatment. Due to the spillover effect, the vanilla estimation of the treatment effect was not robust across different treatment sizes, whereas \verb+SPORTSCausal+ provided a robust estimation. |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2408.11951 |
| By: | David Dickinson; David Masclet |
| Abstract: | Employers use applicant signals to help solve an important asymmetric information problem in organizations. Educational attainment is the classic example of a job market signal, but weaker signals, such as information on extracurricular activities, personality traits or personal habits/history are also commonly used by employers. In this paper, we conducted controlled online experiments to examine the relevance of using validated Dark versus Light personality trait measures to predict behavior across multiple dimensions of interest to organizations: task effort, honesty, and reciprocity. In complementary fashion, a second study examined how these same behaviors are predicted by two weak signals: regular participation in religious activities (public and private) and a history of time in prison. Our first study indicated that Dark relative to Light types were more likely to cheat and shirk in the honesty task, put forth less task effort (i.e., were less productive), but neither type showed evidence for negative cross-task reciprocity (i.e., a spillover from one task to another). In Study 2, ex-Prisoners were more productive than Religious participants in the effort task, and more likely to have shirked but not cheated in the honesty task. Additionally, ex-Prisoners were more likely than Religious participants to exhibit negative crosstask reciprocity. These findings indicate that both Dark types and ex-Prisoners exhibited behaviors (shirking, or dishonesty, or negative reciprocity) that would be considered undesirable or counterproductive in the workplace, which validates the effectiveness of such traits as behavioral signals. Key Words: Experiment; Personality traits; Honesty; Personnel Economics; Screening; Effort |
| JEL: | C9 D9 M5 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:apl:wpaper:24-19 |
| By: | Daniel Suryadarma; Asep Kurniawan; Niken Rarasati; Florischa Ayu Tresnatri; Shintia Revina |
| Keywords: | education, randomization, information, parental involvement, learning outcomes, Indonesia |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:agg:wpaper:3314 |
| By: | Abhijit Banerjee; Rema Hanna; Benjamin A Olken; Sudarno Sumarto |
| Keywords: | Universal Health Insurance |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:agg:wpaper:1994 |
| By: | Kovacs, Roxanne; Dunaiski, Maurice; Galizzi, Matteo M.; Grimalda, Gianluca; Hortala-Vallve, Rafael; Murtin, Fabrice; Putterman, Louis |
| Abstract: | Trust is key for economic and social development. But why do we trust others? We study the motives behind trust in strangers using an experimental trust game played by 7236 participants, in six samples representative of the general populations of Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the UK and the USA. We examine the broadest range of potential determinants of trustor sending to date, including risk tolerance, preferences for redistribution, and conformity. We find that even though self-interest, indicated by expected returns, is relevant for trustor behaviour, the most important correlate of sending is participants' altruism or fairness concerns, as measured by giving in a dictator game. We also find that in our large and representative sample, behaviour in the trust game and responses in a trust survey are significantly correlated, and that similar correlates—altruism in particular—are relevant for both. |
| Keywords: | Wiley deal |
| JEL: | D90 C91 D01 |
| Date: | 2024–08–29 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:124608 |
| By: | Dräger, Lena; Floto, Maximilian; Schröder, Marina |
| Abstract: | We provide evidence for an expectation gap, where risk-averse as well as impatient households and experts provide significantly higher prior inflation forecasts. Using a survey randomized control trial (RCT), we can show that information about inflation forecasts closes this expectations gap. The group, whose prior expectations was farthest from the treatment information, tends to adjust posterior expectations more strongly. However, we find no such effect with respect to forecasts for energy prices, which are less informative. Our results suggest that the expectation gap seems to be partially due to differences in information seeking between different types of individuals. |
| Keywords: | Inflation expectations, patience, risk preference, households, experts, survey experiment, randomized control trial (RCT) |
| JEL: | E52 E31 D84 D90 |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:han:dpaper:dp-726 |
| By: | Hamlin, Daniel; Peltier, Corey (University of Oklahoma); Reeder, Stacy |
| Abstract: | Rigorous evaluations have consistently demonstrated that high impact tutoring is one of the most effective ways to accelerate student learning. However, few studies compare the effects of high impact tutoring to alternative interventions, and even less scholarship tests for differences within tutoring models based on tutoring group size. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of a university-led high impact tutoring model on ninth-grade mathematics achievement at seven high schools. A randomized controlled trial design was used for three separate cohorts of ninth-grade students. In the pooled sample, students (n = 524) in the treatment group participated in high impact tutoring (i.e., student-tutor groups of 2:1 or 3:1) three times a week for an entire academic year. In the control group, students (n = 438) attended a remediation mathematics course. The treatment group showed a difference of approximately a half-year of additional learning (0.14 SD) compared to the control group although both groups achieved academic growth that considerably exceeded expected growth trajectories for ninth-grade students. Results also showed that 2:1 student-tutor groups did not outperform 3:1 student-tutor groups, suggesting that 3:1 student-tutor ratios can be used to expand high impact tutoring with no detrimental effects on academic performance. Considering the well-documented logistical and financial barriers to high impact tutoring, our work indicates that remedial courses may also be a cost-effective alternative in cases when resources for high impact tutoring are limited. |
| Date: | 2024–08–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:edarxi:kqdfp |
| By: | Holger Gerhardt (University of Bonn); Rafael Suchy (University of Oxford, UK) |
| Abstract: | We propose an easy-to-use method for estimating preference parameters experimentally: choices from strictly concave budget restrictions (SCBRs). SCBRs generalize the popular method of analyzing choices from linear budget restrictions (LBRs). SCBRs promise (i) to improve the informational content of individual choices by reducing the number of corner allocations and (ii) to increase the range of identifiable behavioral types. Two online studies on risk and time preferences confirm the benefits of SCBRs vis-à-vis LBRs: (i) They reduce corner allocations drastically and make more participants estimable individually. (ii) They elicit a richer distribution of preference parameters, specifically, distinguishing linear from convex utility. |
| Keywords: | Preference elicitation, time preferences, risk preferences, budget constraints |
| JEL: | C91 D01 D81 D90 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ajk:ajkdps:336 |
| By: | Perez-Vincent, Santiago M.; Puebla, David |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the impact of procedural justice and sanctions on police legitimacy in a middle-income context using a between-subjects vignette experiment among civilians and police officers in Honduras. The scenarios involved civilian--police interactions following a minor infraction, varying in whether the police officer treated the civilian respectfully or disrespectfully, and whether a sanction (fine) was imposed. Respectful treatment increased satisfaction, acceptance of decisions, and willingness to cooperate, while sanctions had the opposite effects on these variables. Sanctions lowered the perceived likelihood of repeating the infraction, whereas respectful treatment had no effect on it. Results were similar for civilians and police officers, though officers assigned greater importance to procedural justice. The study concludes that, while sanctions deter repeated infractions, they can erode legitimacy if not applied respectfully, highlighting the importance of procedural justice in civilian--police interactions. The positive impact of procedural justice among both civilians and officers perceptions supports the desirability and feasibility of its application in this context. |
| Keywords: | Keywords: procedural justice;legitimacy;police;vignettes;Central America;honduras |
| JEL: | K20 H11 |
| Date: | 2024–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:idb:brikps:13626 |
| By: | Frohnweiler, Sarah; Adongo, Charles A.; Beber, Bernd; Lakemann, Tabea; Priebe, Jan; Lay, Jann |
| Abstract: | We use a randomized controlled trial to examine the short- and mid-term impacts of a best-practice training program on (non-)employment outcomes in Ghana. Overall the program did not affect core labor market outcomes at the extensive (employment) and intensive (hours of work, income) margin, but it (i) induced occupational sorting, with treated individuals more likely to work in their field of specialization, (ii) partially improved job quality (written contracts, medical benefits), and (iii) led to better outcomes on a variety of non-labor market indicators (mental health, delayed marriages, access to finance). We also explore policy stakeholders' expectations and perceptions of program success. We find that stakeholders (i) have overly optimistic prior beliefs about the program's impact on core outcomes and (ii) do not update their beliefs as we would expect from Bayes' rule when presented with information about the program's circumscribed effectiveness. We speculate that this result suggests an obstacle for adaptive programming in development cooperation and could help explain the persistence of some suboptimal labor market interventions. |
| Abstract: | Anhand einer randomisierten kontrollierten Studie untersuchen wir die kurz- und mittelfristigen Auswirkungen eines Best-Practice-Ausbildungsprogramms auf Beschäftigung und Lebensbedingungen in Ghana. Insgesamt hatte das Programm keine Auswirkungen auf die zentralen Beschäftigungsindikatoren, weder extensiv (Beschäftigung) noch intensiv (Arbeitsstunden, Einkommen). Allerdings führte das Programm (i) zu einer Verschiebung der Beschäftigung hin zu Berufen, in denen die Ausbildung absolviert wurd, (ii) einer teilweisen Verbesserung der Arbeitsplatzqualität (schriftliche Verträge, medizinische Versoorgung) und (iii) einer Verbesserung einer Reihe von Indikatoren der Lebensqualität (psychische Gesundheit, spätere Eheschließungen, Zugang zu Finanzen). Darüber hinaus untersuchen wir die Erwartungen und Wahrnehmungen der politischen Akteure in Bezug auf den Erfolg des Programms. Wir stellen fest, dass die Akteure (i) a priori zu optimistische Vorstellungen über die Auswirkungen des Programms auf die wichtigsten Indikatoren haben und (ii) ihre Vorstellungen nicht gemäß der Bayes'schen-Regel aktualisieren, wenn sie Informationen über die begrenzte Wirksamkeit des Programms erhalten. Diese Ergebnisse weisen auf ein potenzielles Hindernis für eine adaptive Programmgestaltung in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit hin und könnten das Fortbestehen einiger suboptimaler Arbeitsmarktinterventionen erklären. |
| Keywords: | Vocational training, labor markets, skills, youth, women, impact evaluation, Ghana |
| JEL: | C93 I21 J08 J24 J28 O12 O15 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:rwirep:302181 |
| By: | Masselus, Lise; Petrik, Christina; Ankel-Peters, Jörg |
| Abstract: | While results from individual Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) often do not hold beyond their setting, the accumulation of many RCTs can be used to guide policy. But how many studies are required to confidently generalize? Our paper examines construct validity, an often neglected yet important element affecting generalizability. Construct validity deals with how the operationalization of a treatment corresponds to the broader construct it intends to speak to. The universe of potential operationalizations is referred to as the design space. As an empirical example, we review 45 microfinance RCTs to estimate the size of the design space and to underpin that variations in the treatment operationalization matter for the observed effects. We also show that most papers nevertheless generalize from the operationalized treatment to a broad construct, mostly without acknowledging underlying assumptions, and many lack a transparent reporting of construct validity-relevant features. |
| Abstract: | Während die Ergebnisse einzelner randomisierter kontrollierter Studien (RCTs) oft nicht über ihren Rahmen hinaus Gültigkeit haben, kann die Ansammlung vieler RCTs als Richtschnur für die Politik dienen. Aber wie viele Studien sind erforderlich, um eine sichere Verallgemeinerung zu erreichen? Unser Beitrag untersucht die Konstruktvalidität, ein oft vernachlässigtes, aber wichtiges Element, das die Verallgemeinerbarkeit beeinflusst. Bei der Konstruktvalidität geht es darum, inwieweit die Operationalisierung einer Behandlung dem breiteren Konstrukt entspricht, das sie ansprechen soll. Das Universum der möglichen Operationalisierungen wird als Designraum bezeichnet. Als empirisches Beispiel überprüfen wir 45 Mikrofinanz-RCTs, um die Größe des Designraums abzuschätzen und um zu untermauern, dass Variationen in der Operationalisierung der Behandlung für die beobachteten Effekte von Bedeutung sind. Wir zeigen auch, dass die meisten Arbeiten dennoch von der operationalisierten Behandlung auf ein breites Konstrukt verallgemeinern, meist ohne die zugrundeliegenden Annahmen anzuerkennen, und dass es vielen an einer transparenten Darstellung der für die Konstruktvalidität relevanten Merkmale fehlt. |
| Keywords: | Causal inference, generalizability, meta-science, microfinance |
| JEL: | A11 C18 C93 D04 O12 O16 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:rwirep:302180 |
| By: | Rusch, Hannes (RS: GSBE UM-BIC, Microeconomics & Public Economics, RS: GSBE other - not theme-related research); Vostroknutov, Alexander (RS: GSBE UM-BIC, RS: GSBE other - not theme-related research, Microeconomics & Public Economics) |
| Abstract: | Social norms have become a conceptual cornerstone in the study of human decision making across the social sciences. The functions of social norms in guiding individual and collective decision-making have been extensively scrutinized empirically, too. However, possible evolutionary origins of the psychological mechanisms required to carry out these functions are less well understood. In particular, trajectories from individually adaptive to socially functional heuristics for norm formation have rarely been studied. Here, we trace such a trajectory. We present a model that allows for the comparison of two heuristics broadly applicable across individual and social decision contexts: ‘rejoicing’ own achievements vs. ‘regretting’ missed opportunities. We find that (i) both perform better than the homo oeconomicus benchmark in individual decision problems under plausible ecological assumptions and (ii) each is adaptive in different environments. We argue that observation (i) provides a potent microfoundation for social norms as a product of co-optation of individually evolved heuristics, i.e., a reduction of social norm formation to the evolution of individual traits. Moreover, observation (ii) lends itself to empirical testing, thus laying the ground for a new wave of studies in the literature fascinated with human norm psychology. |
| Date: | 2024–09–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unm:umagsb:2024011 |