Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

Erik Snowberg and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review, 2021, vol. 111, issue 2, 687-719

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

JEL-codes: C83 D90 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (121)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aer.20181065 (application/pdf)
https://doi.org/10.3886/E120227V1 (text/html)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aer.20181065.appx (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aer.20181065.ds (application/zip)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

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

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:111:y:2021:i:2:p:687-719

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

DOI: 10.1257/aer.20181065

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review is currently edited by Esther Duflo

More articles in American Economic Review from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().