Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor system run by Amazon.com, provides quick, easy, and inexpensive access to online research participants. As use of MTurk has grown, so have questions from behavioral researchers about its participants, reliability, and low compensation. In this paper we...

In research involving human subjects, large participation payments often are deemed undesirable because they may provide 'undue inducement' for potential participants to expose themselves to risk. However, although large incentives may encourage participation, they also may signal the riskiness...

Recent research finds that people respond more generously to individual victims described in detail than to equivalent statistical victims described in general terms. We propose that this “identified victim effect” is one manifestation of a more general phenomenon: a positive influence of...

Consumers often behave differently than they would ideally like to behave. We propose that an anticipatory pain of paying drives "tightwads" to spend less than they would ideally like to spend. "Spendthrifts," by contrast, experience too little pain of paying and typically spend more than they...