Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Snowberg, Erik; Yariv, Leeat
• 署名单位: University of British Columbia; National Bureau of Economic Research; Princeton University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20181065
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 687-719
• 关键词: external validity; laboratory experiments; social preferences; gender-differences; LAB EXPERIMENTS; risk attitudes; ECONOMICS; anonymity

摘要

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.