This paper reviews literature dealing with the issue of detecting interviewers who falsify survey data. The most reliable method of detecting falsifiers is through face-to-face reinterviewing of survey participants. However, only a limited number of participants can usually be reinterviewed. A...

English Abstract: Development outcomes come in 'clusters' that seem difficult to exit. Using original data from Colombia, we present evidence of the interconnection between two critical political components: state weakness and clientelism. State weakness creates the right environment for...

This paper explores methodological issues surrounding the use of discrete choice experiments to elicit values for public goods. We develop an explicit game theoretic model of individual decisions, providing conditions under which surveys with a single binary choice question, or sequence of...

City logistics require an understanding of a number of issues that are seldom accounted for in current research. Policies may produce unsatisfactory results because behavioural and contextual aspects are not considered. Relevant data is crucial for forecasting the reactions of agents to policy...

We present new evidence on the randomization methods used in existing experiments, and new simulations comparing these methods. We find that many papers do not describe the randomization in detail, implying that better reporting is needed. Our simulations suggest that in samples of 300 or more,...

The mission of microfinance is generally perceived as compensation for the failure of the mainstream financial institutions to deliver access to finance to the poor. Microloan officers have significant influence on microloans allocation as they contact loan applicants and process information...

Economic theory provides a number of often complementary suggestions for modeling social motives related to altruistic behavior. Questionnaire research on altruism (Rushton et al., 1981) can enable identification of “facets” of altruism. But can we match these facets with pro-social...

Stated choice studies have been applied regularly to the valuation of time savings and other attributes of travelling as perceived by individuals. In such experiments, respondents often provide reference levels for the attributes and the hypothetical choices presented to them are pivoted around...

High profile cases of exploitative labor practices have increased concerns over agricultural working conditions. However, it is unclear whether and to what extent the public is willing to trade-off fair working conditions for higher prices and food imports. We implement a large-scale survey to...

Recent papers by Cox and Sadiraj (2006) and Rubinstein (2006) have pointed out that expected utility theory is more general than has sometimes been acknowledged, and can hence not be refuted as easily by means of experiments. While acknowledging this fact, this note nevertheless demonstrates...