Self-selection bias in a field experiment: Recruiting subjects under different payment schemes

Noemí Herranz-Zarzoso () and Gerardo Sabater-Grande ()
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Noemí Herranz-Zarzoso: LEE and Department of Economics, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain
Gerardo Sabater-Grande: LEE and Department of Economics, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain

No 2020/13, Working Papers from Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain)

Abstract: In this paper, we examine a potential self-selection bias in different samples of subjects depending on the payment scheme offered in the recruiting process. We ran four field experiments in which students enrolled in a microeconomics course were invited to set their own goal for the final exam of the course. Subjects were informed that they could be given a monetary reward if their grade were higher than or equal to their self-chosen goal. We aim to study whether subjects’ willingness to participate depends on their expected performance under diverse announced reward criteria, like a rank-order tournament and piece-rate pay. Given that judgments about future performance are closely tied to previous performance, the midterm exam scores from the current academic course are compared between participants and non-participants in order to analyze sample-sorting effects. We find that only when a rank-order tournament is offered, either exclusively or in combination with another type of payment mechanism, are high-performing students more likely to participate in the experiment than low-performing ones.

Keywords: self-selection bias; piece-rate; rank-order tournament (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C93 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hrm
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jau:wpaper:2020/13

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