Experiments in economics usually provide subjects with starting capital to be used in the experiment. This practice could affect decisions as there is no risk of loss. This phenomenon is known as the house-money effect. In a repeated public goods game, we test for house-money effects by paying subjects in advance an amount they could lose in the experiment. We do not find evidence of a house-money effect over time.

We conduct two experiments using a demographically diverse online subject pool to investigate total and extensive price elasticities of giving by age, income, gender, political ideology, and religiosity. A first exploratory experiment finds that religious subjects give more, are more likely to give, and are less sensitive to the price of giving than non-religious subjects. We find no statistically significant differences in price elasticities by age, income, gender, or political ideology. A second pre-registered experiment confirms these findings.

In a seminal paper, Frederick et al. (J Consum Res 36:553–561, 2009) showed that people’s willingness to purchase a consumer good declined dramatically when opportunity costs were made more salient (Cohen’s d = 0.45–0.85). This finding suggests that people normally do not pay sufficient attention to opportunity costs and as a result make poorer and less efficient decisions, both in private and public domains. To critically assess the strength of opportunity cost neglect, we carried out a systematic review and a meta-analysis including published and non-published experimental work. In total, 39 experimental studies were included in the meta-analysis (N = 14,005). The analysis shows a robust significant effect (Cohen’s d = 0.22; p < 0.001) of opportunity cost neglect across different domains, albeit the effect is considerably smaller than what was originally estimated by Frederick et al. (2009). Our findings highlight the importance of meta-analyses and replications of initial findings.

Evidence shows that the willingness of individuals to avenge punishment inflicted upon them for transgressions they committed constitutes a significant obstacle toward upholding social norms and cooperation. The drivers of this behavior, however, are not well understood. We hypothesize that ulterior motive attribution—the tendency to assign ulterior motives to punishers for their actions—increases the likelihood of counter-punishment. We exogenously manipulate the ability to attribute ulterior motives to punishers by having the punisher be either an unaffected third party or a second party who, as the victim of a transgression, may be driven to punish by a desire to take revenge. We show that survey respondents consider second-party punishment to be substantially more likely to be driven by ulterior motives than an identical, payoff-equalizing punishment meted out by a third party. In line with our hypothesis, we find that second-party punishment is 66.3% more likely to trigger counter-punishment than third-party punishment in a lab experiment. The loss in earnings due to counter-punishment is 64.6% higher for second-party punishers than third-party punishers, all else equal.

Players often fail to coordinate on the efficient equilibrium in laboratory weak-link coordination games. In this paper, we investigate whether such coordination failures can be mitigated by increasing the number of rounds or altering per-period stakes. We find that neither time horizon nor stakes affect equilibrium selection. In contrast to previous findings, players are not more likely to play above the previous period’s minimum choice when the horizon is longer or per-period stakes lower. We also investigate which socio-demographic factors and behavioral traits correlate most strongly with play both in the first round and in subsequent rounds. Cognitive ability as measured by a cognitive reflection test stands out as the characteristic that is most strongly associated with efficient coordination.

Regret aversion often compels individuals to undertake extensive searches before making a choice. Yet, donors hardly search among charitable alternatives prior to giving. It is unclear if donors search little because there is no regret to avoid as they rarely learn the outcome of their donations, or they simply do not care as donation outcomes do not directly impact them. To investigate if absence of regret is a contributing factor behind this lack of search, the current study develops an online experiment wherein subjects can research available charities before donating. While the control group does not receive any regret-inducing feedback (such as relative effectiveness of their donation) ex-post of decision-making, the treatment group is ex-ante aware of receiving charity rankings ex-post. While the control subjects donate without gathering information on charities, the treatment subjects research substantially more and consequentially donate to better ranked charities without decreasing donations.

The expanding literature on lying has exclusively considered lying behavior within a one-dimensional context. While this has been an important first step, many real-world contexts involve the possibility of simultaneously lying in more than one dimension (e.g., reporting one’s income and expenses in a tax declaration). We experimentally investigate individual lying behavior in one- and two-dimensional contexts to understand how the multi-dimensionality of a decision affects lying behavior. Our paper provides the first evidence regarding the pure effect of dimensionality on lying behavior. Using a two-dimensional die-roll task, we show that participants distribute lies unevenly across dimensions, which results in greater over-reporting of the lower-outcome die.

We introduce stochastic loss into a gift exchange game to study how information on intentions affects reciprocity. In one treatment, the respondent observes the amount received and whether a loss occurred, so both the consequential outcome and the sender’s original intention are known. In the other two treatments, information about whether a loss occurred is hidden, and the respondent is only informed of the amount received (outcome) or the amount initially sent (intention). Using both regression-based approaches and non-parametric tests, we find greater reciprocity in the two treatments that reveal intentions. These differences arise even in a simple one-shot setting without reputational benefits and are economically meaningful; they are similar in magnitude to the difference attributable to a full point reduction in the amount received. Our findings show the impact of the information environment on reciprocity in settings with uncertainty and suggest that transparency is important to reciprocity.

Spectator games have emerged as a tool for measuring equality preferences. To measure equality preferences, the spectators are matched with a pair of stakeholders who have been allocated unequal endowments. The spectators decide how much to redistribute from one stakeholder’s endowment to the other one. We conducted a spectator experiment in which we fixed the spectators’ redistribution choice set and varied context of the “no distribution” choice. We found a strong effect of the context variation. The spectators who chose not to redistribute the stakeholders’ endowments increased from 12.3 to 38.0% in the treatment, making “no redistribution” more salient.

I find necessary and sufficient conditions for first-order stochastic dominance (FOSD) violations for choices from a budget line of Arrow securities. Applying this characterization to existing data, I compare FOSD violation rates across a broad set of risk preference elicitation tasks.

Misreporting—a form of lying—is common in online labor and remote work settings. We execute an experiment on Amazon MTurk to determine how ex-ante honesty oaths and worker beliefs impact lying behavior across a range of plausible and implausible lies. Using a novel quantile-style exposition of the types of lies reported, we find that oaths elicit more truthful behavior, reducing both small, plausible lies and large, implausible ones. Shirking is reduced under oath. Worker expectations of group reporting are positively related to individual reporting of plausible lies.

When affirmative action policies target more than one disadvantaged group, they contain uncertainty as to whether an individual who belongs to one of these groups was actually favored. In a laboratory experiment, we study how this feature affects outcomes of affirmative action in the form of quotas, and compare it with two other conditions, namely affirmative action with a certain favored group and no affirmative action. We find that when a group is favored with certainty and the social identity that triggers affirmative action is made salient, affirmed individuals are wrongly perceived as less competent, both by themselves and by others. Consequently, their willingness to compete does not increase and they are selected less for teamwork post competition. Affirmative action with uncertain favored groups does not distort belief in competence, and thus does not induce such unintended consequences. In contrast, it increases competition entry of the affirmed groups and enhances their chances of being selected for teamwork.

Building on a partner-switching mechanism, we experimentally test two theories that posit different reasons why promises breed trust and cooperation. The expectation-based explanation (EBE) operates via belief-dependent guilt aversion, while the commitment-based explanation (CBE) suggests that promises offer commitment power via a (belief-independent) preference to keep one’s word. Previous research performed a similar test, which we argue should be interpreted as concerning informal agreements rather than (unilateral) promises.

The current publication system in economics has encouraged the inflation of positive results in empirical papers. Registered Reports, also called Pre-Results Reviews, are a new submission format for empirical work that takes pre-registration one step further. In Registered Reports, researchers write their papers before running the study and commit to a detailed data collection process and analysis plan. After a first-stage review, a journal can give an In-Principle-Acceptance guaranteeing that the paper will be published if the authors carry out their data collection and analysis as pre-specified. We here propose a practical guide to Registered Reports for empirical economists. We illustrate the major problems that Registered Reports address (p-hacking, HARKing, forking, and publication bias), and present practical guidelines on how to write and review Registered Reports (e.g., the data-analysis plan, power analysis, and correction for multiple-hypothesis testing), with R and STATA codes. We provide specific examples for experimental economics, and show how research design can be improved to maximize statistical power. Last, we discuss some tools that authors, editors, and referees can use to evaluate Registered Reports (checklist, study-design table, and quality assessment).

Recruitment of representative and generalizable adult samples is a major challenge for researchers conducting economic field experiments. Limited access to representative samples or the high cost of obtaining them often leads to the recruitment of non-representative convenience samples. This research compares the findings from two field experiments involving 860 adults: one from a non-representative in-person convenience sample and one from a representative online counterpart. We find no meaningful differences in the key behaviors of interest between the two samples. These findings contribute to a growing body of literature demonstrating that non-representative convenience samples can be sufficient in certain contexts.

Janssen et al. (Exp Econ 14:547–566, 2014) studied an asymmetric, finitely repeated common-pool resource dilemma with free-form communication in which subjects made decisions about investments in an infrastructure, and about extraction from a resource made available by this infrastructure. They found that infrastructure provision and joint payoffs converged to high levels because structurally advantaged head-enders tend to behave fairly by restricting themselves voluntarily at the extraction stage, and structurally disadvantaged “tail-enders” reciprocate by investing. This paper reports a fully independent, pre-registered, double-blind replication attempt conducted in a different lab, that also supplies elevated statistical power and adheres to the highest principles of scientific transparency and openness. We find that the key results of Janssen et al. not only re-appear qualitatively but are quantitatively and statistically strengthened. The conclusions drawn from the results are therefore robust, and the basic design can be confidently used for follow-up research.

People behave much more cooperatively than predicted by the self-interest hypothesis in social dilemmas such as public goods games. Some studies have suggested that many decision makers cooperate not because of genuine cooperative preferences but because they are confused about the incentive structure of the game—and therefore might not be aware of the dominant strategy. In this research, we experimentally manipulate whether decision makers receive explicit information about which strategies maximize individual income and group income or not. Our data reveal no statistically significant effects of the treatment variation, neither on elicited contribution preferences nor on unconditional contributions and beliefs in a repeated linear public goods game. We conclude that it is unlikely that confusion about optimal strategies explains the widely observed cooperation patterns in social dilemmas such as public goods games.

An intriguing study concluded that political conservatives exhibited enhanced self-control using the Stroop task [Clarkson et al.: The self-control consequences of political ideology. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A, 112(27): 8250–8253 (2015)]. We preregistered our plans to re-examine this finding using a larger, representative, incentivized, and ideologically balanced sample (n = 476). Across a variety of specifications, we report a consistent null effect of ideology on Stroop response latencies and the Stroop interference effect. These findings suggest that the previously reported result may not generalize. We conclude that there is no causal relationship between political ideology and self-control, as measured by the Stroop task.

This technical note briefly explains the structure of the z-Tree dataset and presents ztree2stata, a data converting tool for researchers who conduct economic experiments using z-Tree and analyze the data with Stata.