Who should be called to the lab? A comprehensive comparison of students and non-students in classic experimental games

This study compares the behavior of students and non-students in a number of classic experimental games. We find that students are more likely to behave as homo-economicus agents than non-students in games involving other-regarding preferences (Dictator Game, Trust Game and Public Good Game). These differences persist even when controlling for demographics, cognitive ability and risk preferences. In games that do not engage other-regarding preferences (Beauty-contest and Second-price Auction) there is limited evidence of differences in behaviour between subject pools. In none of the five games is there evidence of significant differences in comprehension between students and non-students. Within subject analyses indicate that students are highly consistent in their other-regarding preferences while non-student subjects are inconsistent across other-regarding games. Our findings suggest that experiments using students will provide a lower bound estimate of other-regardedness in the general population while exaggerating the stability of other-regarding preferences.lab experiments, convenience samples, other-regarding preferences, consistency

A comprehensive comparison of students and non-students in classic experimental games

experimental game

El gran experimento: diseño de muestras, datos y máquinas

El profesor Raymond Duch de la Universidad de Oxford inicia la jornada con la conferencia magistral "The experimental big: Desing samples, data and machines", donde muestra los métodos y la forma en que hace investigación respecto a las preferencias económicas en economía y ciencias políticas.Professor Raymond Duch from the University of Oxford begins the day with the keynote lecture "The experimental big: Desing samples, data and machines", where he shows the methods and the way in which he conducts research on economic preferences in economics and political science

Replication data for: Responsibility Attribution for Collective Decision Makers

We argue that individuals have general responsibility attribution heuristics that apply to collective decisions made, for example, by families, teams within firms, boards in international organisations or coalition governments. We conduct laboratory and online survey experiments designed to tease out the heuristics subjects use in their responsibility attribution for collective decision makers. The lab experiments comprise a collective dictator game in which decision makers have weighted votes and recipients can punish individual decision makers. Our results show that recipients punish unfair allocations and mainly target the decision maker with proposal power and with the largest vote share. We find weak evidence that decision makers with veto power are targeted or that recipients punish proportional to weighted voting power. The online survey experiment demonstrates that subjects indeed believe that the decision maker with proposal power has the most influence on the collective decision outcome. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of vote choice