Testing the Waters: Behavior Across Participant Pools

59 Pages Posted: 3 Jul 2018

See all articles by Erik Snowberg

Erik Snowberg

California Institute of Technology - Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Leeat Yariv

Princeton University; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Multiple version iconThere are 3 versions of this paper

Date Written: June 2018

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: Experiments, External Validity, Lab Selection

JEL Classification: B41, C80, C90

Suggested Citation

Snowberg, Erik and Yariv, Leeat, Testing the Waters: Behavior Across Participant Pools (June 2018). CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP13015, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3206780

Erik Snowberg (Contact Author)

California Institute of Technology - Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences ( email )

1200 East California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91125
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Leeat Yariv

Princeton University ( email )

Princeton, NJ 08544-1021
United States

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

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