Going Virtual: A Step-by-Step Guide to Taking the In-Person Experimental Lab Online

This guide provides a detailed account of procedures for conducting traditional in-person laboratory experiments in a “virtual setting.” The main objective of these procedures is to maintain the control of traditional in-person lab studies when conducting studies over the internet. Using the participant pool of the in-person lab the key procedural steps include participants having their webcams on throughout the experiment, technical screenings and attention pledges, playing pre-recorded instructions out loud, upholding clear experimenter roles and communication protocols when interacting with participants, and finally detailed and scripted procedures for managing participants throughout the session. The described procedures have been used for more than 100 sessions and have secured results that are indistinguishable from those from the in-person lab

Simon Doesn’t Say: Minimal Qualitative Distortions from Experimenter Demand

Experimenter demand is a clear threat to the validity of experimental results. To understand the extent of this threat for lab studies, we apply the quantitative frame- work from de Quidt, Haushofer and Roth (2018) to explore whether experimenter demand can generate flawed qualitative inference in experimental studies, using four classic behavioral findings. In these four settings we examine the extent to which demand can alter the nature of a comparative-static conclusion, a stronger test of the potential distortions resulting from experimenter demand. Starting with the laboratory population, we demonstrate that even in a stark environment with deliberate researcher attempts to manipulate participant behavior, quantitative effects are small and experimenter demand effects are not large enough to impact the core qualitative inferences in our four experimental comparisons. This result is then extended to two commonly used online populations, Prolific and mTurk–which show larger quantitative demand effects, but again, not large enough to alter the qualitative conclusions

Well Excuse Me! Replicating and Connecting Excuse-Seeking Behaviors

Excuse-seeking behavior that facilitates replacing altruistic choices with self-interested ones has been documented in several domains. In a laboratory study, we replicate three leading papers on this topic: Dana et al. (2007), and the use of information avoidance; Exley (2015), and the use of differential risk preferences; and Di Tella et al. (2015), and the use of motivated beliefs. The replications were conducted as part of a graduate course, attempting to embed one answer to the growing call for experimental replications within the pedagogic process. We fully replicate the simpler Dana et al. paper, and broadly replicate the core findings for the other two projects, though with reduced effect sizes and a failure to replicate on some secondary measures. Finally, we attempt to connect behaviors to facilitate the understanding of how each fit within the broader literature. However, we find no connections across domains

Experiments on Intertemporal Choice

This dissertation consists of three essays that contribute to the field of behavioral economics by using experimental methods to explore the causes and impacts of impatient behavior. Chapter 1 identifies excuse-based procrastination. Excuses, or justifications, are a novel environmental factor that I show can induce myopic decisions in agents who would otherwise have been patient. In a lab experiment, participants allocate work between now and later. Some decisions have uncertainty over future work that can be costlessly resolved. I show that participants remain willfully ignorant as an excuse to do less immediate work, even at the risk of increasing total work. I propose that this is due to excuses mitigating a psychic cost associated with impatient behavior that makes procrastination less attractive, which I find suggestive evidence for in a survey. Chapter 2 uses a longitudinal online experiment with real-effort tasks to explore how streaks, i.e., tracking the consecutive periods a task is performed, can serve as a psychological motivator that decreases impatient behavior for tasks that have immediate costs but delayed benefits. However, there is a tradeoff with myopic reactions to broken streaks. Allowing for flexibility, such as “cheat days” when effort costs are higher than normal, can mitigate this by mechanically preserving a streak, but can be exploited to reduce effort on those days. Chapter 3 looks at how differential time horizons for debt repayment penalties impact the choices of financially distressed borrowers who are faced with the decision of what, not if, to default. Using observational credit report data, we find that a substantial subset of such borrowers who hold a varied debt portfolio avoid defaulting on revolving credit, resulting in an eventual default on their student loans. Although defaulting on student loans has much more severe penalties than defaulting on revolving credit, they are much more delayed. We explore how this timing influences financial decision making using an online survey