This paper presents results from two large-scale natural field experiments that tested the effect of social norm messages on tax compliance. Using administrative data from >200,000 individuals in the ...United Kingdom, we show that including social norm messages in standard reminder letters increases payment rates for overdue tax. This result offers a rare example of social norm messages affecting tax compliance behavior in a real world setting. We find no evidence that loss framing is more effective than gain framing. Descriptive norms appear to be more effective than injunctive norms. Messages referring to public services or financial information also significantly increased payment rates. The field experiments accelerated the collection of tax revenue at little cost.
•We present results from two large natural field experiments that use data from 200,000 individuals in the United Kingdom.•Including social norms and public services messages in official reminder letters increased payment rates for overdue tax.•This low-cost intervention offers a rare example of social norm messages increasing tax compliance in a real world setting.
One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job ...seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the extent of salary negotiations and the nature of sorting. We find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate for a higher wage, whereas women are more likely to signal their willingness to work for a lower wage. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, these differences disappear completely. In terms of sorting, we find that men, in contrast to women, prefer job environments where the “rules of wage determination” are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous.
This paper was accepted by Gérard P. Cachon, behavioral economics.
The dictator game represents a workhorse within experimental economics, frequently used to test theory and to provide insights into the prevalence of social preferences. This study explores more ...closely the dictator game and the literature’s preferred interpretation of its meaning by collecting data from nearly 200 dictators across treatments that varied the action set and the origin of endowment. The action set variation includes choices in which the dictator can “take” money from the other player. Empirical results question the received interpretation of dictator game giving: many fewer agents are willing to transfer money when the action set includes taking. Yet, a result that holds regardless of action set composition is that agents do not ubiquitously choose the most selfish outcome. The results have implications for theoretical models of social preferences, highlight that “institutions” matter a great deal, and point to useful avenues for future research using simple dictator games and relevant manipulations.
In this introduction to the symposium, I first offer an overview of the spectrum of experimental methods in economics, from laboratory experiments to the field experiments that are the subject of ...this symposium. I then offer some thoughts about the potential gains from doing economic research using field experiments and my own mental checklist of 14 steps to improve the chances of carrying out an economics field experiment successfully. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
The Market for Charitable Giving List, John A.
The Journal of economic perspectives,
04/2011, Letnik:
25, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Through good and bad economic times, charitable gifts have continued to roll in largely unabated over the past half century. In a typical year, total charitable gifts of money now exceed 2 percent of ...gross domestic product. Moreover, charitable giving has nearly doubled in real terms since 1990, and the number of nonprofit organizations registered with the IRS grew by nearly 60 percent from 1995 to 2005. This study provides a perspective on the economic interplay of three types of actors: donors, charitable organizations, and government. How much is given annually? Who gives? Who are the recipients of these gifts? Would changes in the tax treatment of charitable contributions lead to more or less giving? How can charitable institutions design mechanisms to generate the greatest level of gifts? What about the effectiveness of seed money and matching grants?
Social scientists have increasingly turned to the experimental method to understand human behaviour. One critical issue that makes solving social problems difficult is scaling up the idea from a ...small group to a larger group in more diverse situations. The urgency of scaling policies impacts us every day, whether it is protecting the health and safety of a community or enhancing the opportunities of future generations. Yet, a common result is that, when we scale up ideas, most experience a 'voltage drop'-that is, on scaling, the cost-benefit profile depreciates considerably. Here I argue that, to reduce voltage drops, we must optimally generate policy-based evidence. Optimality requires answering two crucial questions: what information should be generated and in what sequence. The economics underlying the science of scaling provides insights into these questions, which are in some cases at odds with conventional approaches. For example, there are important situations in which I advocate flipping the traditional social science research model to an approach that, from the beginning, produces the type of policy-based evidence that the science of scaling demands. To do so, I propose augmenting efficacy trials by including relevant tests of scale in the original discovery process, which forces the scientist to naturally start with a recognition of the big picture: what information do I need to have scaling confidence?
Recent discoveries in behavioral economics have led to important new insights concerning what can happen in markets. Such gains in knowledge have come primarily via laboratory experiments-a missing ...piece of the puzzle in many cases is parallel evidence drawn from naturally occurring field counterparts. We provide a small movement in this direction by taking advantage of a unique opportunity to work with a Chinese high-tech manufacturing facility. Our study revolves around using insights gained from one of the most influential lines of behavioral research-framing manipulations-in an attempt to increase worker productivity in the facility. Using a natural field experiment, we report several insights. For example, conditional incentives framed as both "losses" and "gains" increase productivity for both individuals and teams. In addition, teams more acutely respond to bonuses posed as losses than as comparable bonuses posed as gains. The magnitude of this framing effect is roughly 1%: that is, total team productivity is enhanced by 1% purely due to the framing manipulation. Importantly, we find that neither the framing nor the incentive effect lose their significance over time; rather, the effects are observed over the entire sample period. Moreover, we learn that repeated interaction with workers and conditionality of the bonus contract are substitutes for sustenance of incentive effects in the long run.
This paper was accepted by Gérard P. Cachon, decision analysis.
Voting to Tell Others DELLAVIGNA, STEFANO; LIST, JOHN A.; MALMENDIER, ULRIKE ...
Review of economic studies/The review of economic studies,
01/2017, Letnik:
84, Številka:
1 (298)
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Why do people vote? We design a field experiment to estimate a model of voting "because others will ask". The expectation of being asked motivates turnout if individuals derive pride from telling ...others that they voted, or feel shame from admitting that they did not vote, provided that lying is costly. In a door-to-door survey about election turnout, we experimentally vary (1) the informational content and use of a flyer pre-announcing the survey, (2) the duration and payment for the survey, and (3) the incentives to lie about past voting. The experimental results indicate significant social image concerns. For the 2010 Congressional election, we estimate a value of voting "to tell others" of about $15, contributing 2 percentage points to turnout. Finally, we evaluate a get-out-the-vote intervention in which we tell potential voters that we will ask if they voted.
The analysis of data from experiments in economics routinely involves testing multiple null hypotheses simultaneously. These different null hypotheses arise naturally in this setting for at least ...three different reasons: when there are multiple outcomes of interest and it is desired to determine on which of these outcomes a treatment has an effect; when the effect of a treatment may be heterogeneous in that it varies across subgroups defined by observed characteristics and it is desired to determine for which of these subgroups a treatment has an effect; and finally when there are multiple treatments of interest and it is desired to determine which treatments have an effect relative to either the control or relative to each of the other treatments. In this paper, we provide a bootstrap-based procedure for testing these null hypotheses simultaneously using experimental data in which simple random sampling is used to assign treatment status to units. Using the general results in Romano and Wolf (Ann Stat 38:598–633,
2010
), we show under weak assumptions that our procedure (1) asymptotically controls the familywise error rate—the probability of one or more false rejections—and (2) is asymptotically balanced in that the marginal probability of rejecting any true null hypothesis is approximately equal in large samples. Importantly, by incorporating information about dependence ignored in classical multiple testing procedures, such as the Bonferroni and Holm corrections, our procedure has much greater ability to detect truly false null hypotheses. In the presence of multiple treatments, we additionally show how to exploit logical restrictions across null hypotheses to further improve power. We illustrate our methodology by revisiting the study by Karlan and List (Am Econ Rev 97(5):1774–1793,
2007
) of why people give to charitable causes.
This paper uses a natural field experiment to connect corporate social responsibility (CSR) to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than ...1,500 workers, we find that our use of CSR increases employee misbehavior—24% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duties when we introduce CSR. Observed data patterns across the treatments are consonant with a model of “moral licensing,” whereby the “doing good” nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that is harmful to the firm.
This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis
.
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