@article{7b0c1f44bd5148019d1908f86be3e60f,
title = "Measuring and bounding experimenter demand",
abstract = "We propose a technique for assessing robustness to demand effects of findings from experiments and surveys. The core idea is that by deliberately inducing demand in a structured way we can bound its influence. We present a model in which participants respond to their beliefs about the researcher's objectives. Bounds are obtained by manipulating those beliefs with {"}demand treatments.{"} We apply the method to 11 classic tasks, and estimate bounds averaging 0.13 standard deviations, suggesting that typical demand effects are probably modest. We also show how to compute demand-robust treatment effects and how to structurally estimate the model.",
author = "{De Quidt}, Jonathan and Johannes Haushofer and Christopher Roth",
note = "Funding Information: * de Quidt: Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden, and CESifo (email: jonathan.dequidt@iies.su.se); Haushofer: Department of Psychology and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 427 Peretsman-Scully Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540, NBER, and Busara Center for Behavioral Economics (email: haushofer@princeton.edu); Roth: Department of Economics, University of Oxford, Keble College, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PG, United Kingdom, and CSAE (email: christopher.roth@economics.ox.ac.uk). This paper was accepted to the AER under the guidance of Stefano DellaVigna, Coeditor. We thank three anonymous referees for useful comments. We are grateful to Johannes Abeler, Dan Benjamin, Stefano Caria, Rachel Cassidy, Tom Cunningham, Elwyn Davies, Armin Falk, Thomas Graeber, Don Green, Alexis Grigorieff, Johannes Hermle, George Loewenstein, Simon Quinn, Matthew Rabin, Gautam Rao, Bertil Tungodden, and Liad Weiss for comments. We thank Stefano DellaVigna, Lukas Kiessling, and Devin Pope for sharing code. Moreover, we thank seminar participants at Bergen, Berlin, Bonn, Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, CESifo, Cologne, IIES, LSE, Lund, Melbourne, Oxford, SITE, Stockholm, Sussex, Warwick, Wharton, and Wisconsin. We thank Justin Abraham for excellent research assistance. de Quidt acknowledges financial support from Handelsbanken{\textquoteright}s Research Foundations, grant no. B2014-0460:1. The experiments in this paper were funded by Princeton University. IRB approval was obtained at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. The experiments were pre-registered as trial 1248 on the American Economic Association RCT Registry, available at https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/1248. The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} Copyright 2018 by the American Economic Association.",
year = "2018",
month = nov,
doi = "10.1257/aer.20171330",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "108",
pages = "3266--3302",
journal = "American Economic Review",
issn = "0002-8282",
publisher = "American Economic Association",
number = "11",
}