Social preferences in the online laboratory: A randomized experiment

Hergueux, Jérôme; Jacquemet, Nicolas

Social preferences in the online laboratory: A randomized experiment

Jérôme Hergueux () and Nicolas Jacquemet ()
Additional contact information
Jérôme Hergueux: LARGE - Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg, Sciences Po - Sciences Po

Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL

Abstract: Internet is a very attractive technology for experiments implementation, both in order to reach more diverse and larger samples and as a field of economic research in its own right. This paper reports on an experiment performed both online and in the laboratory, designed so as to strengthen the internal validity of decisions elicited over the Internet. We use the same subject pool, the same monetary stakes and the same decision interface, and randomly assign two group of subjects between the Internet and a traditional University laboratory to compare behavior in a set of social preferences games. This comparison concludes in favor of the reliability of behaviors elicited through the Internet. Our behavioral results contradict the predictions of social distance theory, as we find that subjects allocated to the Internet treatment behave as if they were more altruistic, more trusting, more trustworthy and less risk averse than laboratory subjects. Those findings have practical importance for the growing community of researchers interested in using the Internet as a vehicle for social experiments and bear interesting methodological lessons for social scientists interested in using experiments to research the Internet as a field.

Keywords: internet; methodology; randomized assignment.; randomized assignment; Social experiment; field experiment; allocation aléatoire.; expériences de terrain; expériences en laboratoire; Méthode expérimentale (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-ict and nep-upt
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00748615v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in 2012

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00748615v1/document (application/pdf)

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00748615

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().