Working Paper: NBER ID: w24781
Authors: Erik Snowberg; Leeat Yariv
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: behavioral economics; external validity; experimental economics; student populations
JEL Codes: B41; C80; C90
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| university students (I23) | behaviors that serve as upper bounds on normative rationality and cognitive sophistication (D01) |
| university students (I23) | less generous and more risk-neutral behavior (D11) |
| university students (I23) | differences in average behaviors compared to general population (D91) |
| correlations between elicited behaviors (C99) | similar across student, representative, and MTurk samples (C91) |
| students change their behavior in lab (C92) | no evidence (Y70) |
| differences in behavior levels (L20) | underlying correlations are robust across samples (C10) |