Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

2021/01/28 by Erik Snowberg, Leeat Yariv · 21 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · Decision Sciences · #Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

paper · doi:10.1257/aer.20181065

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. (JEL C83, D90, D91)

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