TY - JOUR
T1 - Testing the Waters
T2 - Behavior across Participant Pools
AU - Snowberg, Erik
AU - Yariv, Leeat
N1 - 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 -