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Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

Erik Snowberg, Leeat YarivEconomics微观经济学FT50
American Economic Review2021-01-28University of British Columbia; Princeton University; Center for Economic and Policy ResearchDOI
Citations265
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References58
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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 C83, D90, D91)

Leverage (statistics)Sample (material)PopulationSet (abstract data type)Amazon rainforestScale (ratio)PsychologyStatisticsComputer scienceGeographyEcologyMathematics