Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

Leeat Yariv and Erik Snowberg

No 13015, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire university student population, a representative sample of the U.S. 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 largely similar across samples. Furthermore, non-student samples exhibit higher measurement error. Adding historical lab participation data, we find a small set of attributes over which lab participants differ from non-lab participants. Using an additional set of lab experiments, we see no evidence of observer effects.

Keywords: Lab selection; External validity; Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B41 C80 C90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

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