Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

Erik Snowberg and Leeat Yariv

No 7136, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

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
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

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