TY - JOUR
T1 - Testing the Waters
T2 - Behavior across Participant Pools
AU - Snowberg, Erik
AU - Yariv, Leeat
N1 - Funding Information:
*Snowberg: Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia and NBER (email: snowberg@ mail.ubc.ca); Yariv: Department of Economics, Princeton University, Center for Economic Policy Research, and NBER (email: lyariv@princeton.edu). Stefano DellaVigna was the coeditor for this article. Snowberg gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF grants SES-1156154 and SMA-1329195. Yariv gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF grant SES-1629613 and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant 1158. We thank four anonymous reviewers for many helpful suggestions. We also thank Marina Agranov, Alessandra Casella, Armin Falk, Guillaume Fréchette, Drew Fudenberg, Johannes Haushoffer, Salvatore Nunnari, Nichole Szembrot, Emanuel Vespa, and seminar audiences at Columbia University, Cornell, NTU, UCSD, and University of Maryland for useful comments and encouragement.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Economic Association. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/2
Y1 - 2021/2
N2 - We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire undergraduate university student population, a representative sample of the US population, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about the external validity of experiments with student participants. Behavior in the student population offers bounds on behaviors in other populations, and correlations between behaviors are similar across samples. Furthermore, non-student samples exhibit higher levels of noise. Adding historical lab participation data, we find a small set of attributes over which lab participants differ from non-lab participants. An additional set of lab experiments shows no evidence of observer effects.
AB - We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire undergraduate university student population, a representative sample of the US population, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about the external validity of experiments with student participants. Behavior in the student population offers bounds on behaviors in other populations, and correlations between behaviors are similar across samples. Furthermore, non-student samples exhibit higher levels of noise. Adding historical lab participation data, we find a small set of attributes over which lab participants differ from non-lab participants. An additional set of lab experiments shows no evidence of observer effects.
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U2 - 10.1257/AER.20181065
DO - 10.1257/AER.20181065
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85101152360
SN - 0002-8282
VL - 111
SP - 687
EP - 719
JO - American Economic Review
JF - American Economic Review
IS - 2
ER -