Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools / Erik Snowberg, Leeat Yariv.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Snowberg, Erik.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Yariv, Leeat.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w24781.

NBER working paper series no. w24781

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Testing the Waters

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.

Summary:

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire university student population, a representative sample of the U.S. 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 largely similar across samples. Furthermore, non-student samples exhibit higher measurement error. Adding historical lab participation data, we find a small set of attributes over which lab participants differ from non-lab participants. Using an additional set of lab experiments, we see no evidence of observer effects.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2018.