From the Field to the Lab. An Experiment on the Representativeness of Standard Laboratory Subjects

L. Frigau, T. Medda and Vittorio Pelligra

Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia

Abstract: We replicate in the lab an artefactual field experiment originally run with a representative sample of the population. Our results show that, despite the many differences between university students and representative subjects from the whole population, the two samples closely follow a common behavioral pattern in a set of binary dictator games. The only exception seems to be represented by a significant difference in those situations where self-interest plays a prominent role. This gap is mainly related to the academic background of the participants - our sample of undergraduate economics students, in fact, differs in its degree of self-interested choices both from the representative group of the population and from its sub-sample of students from heterogeneous disciplines.

Keywords: Prosocial Behavior; Methodology; External Validity; Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-dcm, nep-edu, nep-exp and nep-hpe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: From the field to the lab. An experiment on the representativeness of standard laboratory subjects (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cns:cnscwp:201704

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