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  3. American Economic Review
  4. February 2021
  5. Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

American Economic Review

ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)

Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

  • Erik Snowberg
  • Leeat Yariv
American Economic Review
vol. 111, no. 2, February 2021
(pp. 687–719)
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Abstract

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.

Citation

Snowberg, Erik, and Leeat Yariv. 2021. "Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools." American Economic Review, 111 (2): 687–719. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20181065

Additional Materials

JEL Classification

  • C83 Survey Methods; Sampling Methods
  • D90 Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: General
  • D91 Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making