In recent years, field experiments have reshaped policy worldwide, but scaling ideas remains a thorny challenge. Perhaps the most important issue facing policymakers today is deciding which ideas to scale. One approach to attenuate this information problem is to augment traditional A/B...

This study investigates the effectiveness of donation matching gift schemes using lotteries for increasing charitable giving relative to deterministic matches of equivalent or higher expected value and a no-match control. We recruit 1,402 online participants and randomly assign them to one of...

What should researchers consider when designing experiments that (also) collect self-reported well-being (SWB) data? Focusing on experiments in economics, we examine the motivation behind SWB-data collection, survey leading past examples, and highlight potential pitfalls and their proposed...

There is much disagreement about the extent to which financial incentives motivate study participants. We elicit preferences for being paid for completing a survey, including a one-in-twenty chance of winning a $100 electronic gift card, a guaranteed electronic gift card with the same expected...

Clinical trials following the "gold standard" of random assignment frequently use independent lotteries to allocate patients to treatment and control arms. However, independent assignment can generate treatment and control arms that are unbalanced (i.e. treatment and control populations with...

This study investigates how to use regression adjustment to reduce variance in experimental data. We show that the estimators recommended in the literature satisfy an orthogonality property with respect to the parameters of the adjustment. This observation greatly simplifies the derivation of...

This paper describes a number of strategies that experimenters may use to improve the external validity of their own findings, and of their research field as a whole. The paper emphasizes a dynamic view of research processes, in which learning about treatment and treatment adoption does not...

When studying policy-relevant topics, researchers' policy preferences may shape the design, execution, analysis, and interpretation of results. Detection of such bias is challenging because the research process itself is not normally part of a controlled experimental setting. Our analysis...

Although fake online customer reviews have become prevalent on platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, little is known about how these reviews influence consumer behavior. This paper provides the first experimental estimates of the effects of fake reviews on individual demand and...