Preregistration and reproducibility

Many view preregistration as a promising way to improve research credibility. However, scholars have argued that using pre-analysis plans in Experimental Economics has limited benefits. This paper argues that preregistration of studies is likely to improve research credibility. I show that in a setting with selective reporting and low statistical power, effect sizes are highly inflated, and this translates into low reproducibility. Preregistering the original studies could avoid such inflation of effect sizes—through increasing the share of “frequentist” researchers—and would lead to more credible power analyses for replication studies. Numerical applications of the model indicate that the inflation bias could be very large in practice, and available empirical evidence is in line with the central assumptions of the model.publishedVersio

It Pays to be Nice: The Benefits of Cooperating in Markets

We contribute to the experimental literature by examining the causal effect of partner choice opportunities on the earnings of different cooperative types. We first elicit cooperative types and then randomly assign subjects to a repeated prisoner's dilemma game, with either mutual partner choice or random matching. In each period, the individual who fails to attain a partner is excluded from the group. The results from three experiments show that mutual partner choice enables cooperators to outperform free riders; cooperators tend to earn more than free riders and are less frequently excluded. Our findings are robust with respect to varying group size and whether subjects are reminded about their entire partner and earnings history or only their recent history.publishedVersio

Extending the cooperative phenotype: Assessing the stability of cooperation across countries

This paper studies whether individual cooperation is stable across settings and over time. Involving more than 7,000 subjects on two different continents, this study documents positive correlation in cooperative behavior across economic games in Norway, Sweden, Austria, and the United States. The game measures also correlate with a tendency to make deontological judgments in moral dilemmas, and display of general trust toward strangers. Using time-variation in the data, we test whether temporal stability of behavior is similar in the United States and Norway, and find similar stability estimates for both the American and Norwegian samples. The findings here provide further evidence of the existence of a stable behavioral inclination toward prosociality – a “cooperative phenotype,” as it has recently been termed. Also in line with previous research, we find that punishment and cooperation seem to be uncorrelated.publishedVersio

Фауна Гаринского района и ее изучение на уроках биологии

В работе автором дается описание видового разнообразия позвоночных животных Гаринского района и особенности его изучения на уроках биологии. Приводится общая характеристика Гаринского района, а также общая характеристика классов позвоночных животных данного района. Кроме того, автором разработано методическое проектирование пяти уроков по изучению классов позвоночных животных Гаринского района

The Intuitive Cooperation Hypothesis Revisited: A Meta-analytic Examination of Effect Size and Between-study Heterogeneity

The hypothesis that intuition promotes cooperation has attracted considerable attention. Although key results in this literature have failed to replicate in pre-registered studies, recent meta-analyses report an overall effect of intuition on cooperation. We address the question with a meta-analysis of 82 cooperation experiments, spanning four different types of intuition manipulations—time pressure, cognitive load, depletion, and induction—including 29,315 participants in total. We obtain a positive overall effect of intuition on cooperation, though substantially weaker than that reported in prior meta-analyses, and between studies the effect exhibits a high degree of systematic variation. We find that this overall effect depends exclusively on the inclusion of six experiments featuring emotion-induction manipulations, which prompt participants to rely on emotion over reason when making allocation decisions. Upon excluding from the total data set experiments featuring this class of manipulations, between-study variation in the meta-analysis is reduced substantially—and we observed no statistically discernable effect of intuition on cooperation. Overall, we fail to obtain compelling evidence for the intuitive cooperation hypothesis

Examining the generalizability of research findings from archival data

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability—for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time periods and 57% emerged in other geographies. Overall, only limited empirical evidence emerged for context sensitivity. In a forecasting survey, independent scientists were able to anticipate which effects would find support in tests in new samples

Choosing a cellmate in the prisoner's dilemma. An experimental study

This thesis investigates cooperative behavior in a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma using experimental methods. In the experiment, we allow subjects to form voluntary partnerships by mutual choice, and to communicate through a chat room. Three main research questions were pursued. First, we wanted to show that mutual partner choice could increase cooperation in an environment with a simple matching mechanism. Also, we wanted to study whether there are positive spillover effects between partner choice and communication. Finally, we wanted to replicate a finding than partner choice opportunities induce strategic behavior ( competitive altruism") in humans. Our study makes several novel contributions to the existing literature. We show that mutual partner choice increases cooperation. We find that through partner choice, the game is transformed from a random process to repeated and stable interactions. The competitive altruism hypothesis is supported. We find no effect of partner choice when chat room communication is allowed. We believe communication and partner choice both fail to increase cooperation in the most selfish subjects. Therefore, there is little room for a further effect of partner choice when communication is possible. The experiment was computerized using the experimental software z-Tree 3.3.8. Results were analyzed using the statistical software STATA/IC 13.1 and Microsoft Excel 2010. The Meltzer Fund and the Department of Economics financed the project

Preregistration and reproducibility

Many view preregistration as a promising way to improve research credibility. However, scholars have argued that using pre-analysis plans in Experimental Economics has limited benefits. This paper argues that preregistration of studies is likely to improve research credibility. I show that in a setting with selective reporting and low statistical power, effect sizes are highly inflated, and this translates into low reproducibility. Preregistering the original studies could avoid such inflation of effect sizes—through increasing the share of “frequentist” researchers—and would lead to more credible power analyses for replication studies. Numerical applications of the model indicate that the inflation bias could be very large in practice, and available empirical evidence is in line with the central assumptions of the model

It Pays to be Nice: The Benefits of Cooperating in Markets

We contribute to the experimental literature by examining the causal effect of partner choice opportunities on the earnings of different cooperative types. We first elicit cooperative types and then randomly assign subjects to a repeated prisoner's dilemma game, with either mutual partner choice or random matching. In each period, the individual who fails to attain a partner is excluded from the group. The results from three experiments show that mutual partner choice enables cooperators to outperform free riders; cooperators tend to earn more than free riders and are less frequently excluded. Our findings are robust with respect to varying group size and whether subjects are reminded about their entire partner and earnings history or only their recent history