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"Laboratory Experiments"
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Beliefs about Gender
We conduct laboratory experiments that explore how gender stereotypes shape beliefs about ability of oneself and others in different categories of knowledge. The data reveal two patterns. First, men’s and women’s beliefs about both oneself and others exceed observed ability on average, particularly in difficult tasks. Second, overestimation of ability by both men and women varies across categories. To understand these patterns, we develop a model that separates gender stereotypes from misestimation of ability related to the difficulty of the task. We find that stereotypes contribute to gender gaps in self-confidence, assessments of others, and behavior in a cooperative game.
Journal Article
What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal about the Real World?
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.
Journal Article
Law and Norms
A large theoretical literature argues laws exert a causal effect on norms, but empirical evidence remains scant. Using a novel identification strategy, we provide a compelling empirical test of this proposition. We use incentivized vignette experiments to directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds. Our large-scale experiments (n = 7,000) run in the United Kingdom, United States, and China show that laws can causally influence social norms. Results are robust across different samples and methods of measuring norms, and are consistent with a model of social image concerns where individuals care about the inferences others make about their underlying prosociality.
Journal Article
Cognitive Imprecision and Small-Stakes Risk Aversion
Observed choices between risky lotteries are difficult to reconcile with expected utility maximization, both because subjects appear to be too risk averse with regard to small gambles for this to be explained by diminishing marginal utility of wealth, as stressed by Rabin (2000), and because subjects’ responses involve a random element. We propose a unified explanation for both anomalies, similar to the explanation given for related phenomena in the case of perceptual judgments: they result from judgments based on imprecise (and noisy) mental representations of the decision situation. In this model, risk aversion results from a sort of perceptual bias—but one that represents an optimal decision rule, given the limitations of the mental representation of the situation. We propose a quantitative model of the noisy mental representation of simple lotteries, based on other evidence regarding numerical cognition, and test its ability to explain the choice frequencies that we observe in a laboratory experiment.
Journal Article
Charity in the Laboratory: Matching, Competition, and Group Identity
We conduct a laboratory experiment in which participants can make donations to real charities. We vary whether the experimenter provides matching funds for any such donations, and whether there is individual or team competition for these matching funds. Our results indicate that providing matching funds for all donations does increase donations from 23% to 33% of the endowment. While individual competition for matching funds had nearly the same effectiveness as matching all donations, by far the most effective approach was to form (anonymous) teams that competed for matching funds; this led to donations of 47% of the endowment. We appeal to the notion of group identity to explain our results—participants seemed to be reluctant to “let down their team” in a competition. Our results can be seen as providing support for the notion that combining group identity and competition creates a motivation that can potentially be harnessed effectively for prosocial purposes.
This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Journal Article
When Choices Are Mistakes
Using a laboratory experiment, we identify whether decision-makers consider it a mistake to violate canonical choice axioms. To do this, we incentivize subjects to report axioms they want their decisions to satisfy. Then, subjects make lottery choices which might conflict with their axiom preferences. In instances of conflict, we give subjects the opportunity to re-evaluate their decisions. We find that many individuals want to follow canonical axioms and revise their choices to be consistent with the axioms. In a shorter online experiment, we show correlations of mistakes with response times and measures of cognition.
Journal Article
Do lab experiments misrepresent social preferences?
Social preference research has received considerable attention among economists in recent years. However, the empirical foundation of social preferences is largely based on laboratory experiments with self-selected students as participants. This is potentially problematic as students participating in experiments may behave systematically different than nonparticipating students or nonstudents. In this paper we empirically investigate whether laboratory experiments with student samples misrepresent the importance of social preferences. Our first study shows that students who exhibit stronger prosocial inclinations in an unrelated field donation are not more likely to participate in experiments. This suggests that self-selection of more prosocial students into experiments is not a major issue. Our second study compares the behavior of students and participants recruited from the general population in a trust experiment. In general, we find very similar behavioral patterns for the two groups, but nonstudents make significantly more generous repayments suggesting that results from student samples might be seen as a lower bound for the importance of prosocial behavior.
Journal Article
LABORATORY MEASURE OF CHEATING PREDICTS SCHOOL MISCONDUCT
Laboratory experiments provide insights into the drivers of cheating behaviour, but it is unclear to what extent cheating in the laboratory generalises to the field. We conducted an experiment with middle and high school students to test whether a common laboratory measure of cheating predicts three types of school misconduct: (i) disruptiveness in class; (ii) homework non-completion; and (iii) absenteeism. We find that students who cheat in the experimental task are more likely to misbehave at school, suggesting that experimental measures of cheating generalise to rule violating behaviour in naturally occurring environments.
Journal Article