In this paper, we relax the hard closure property of experiments that have been used to study endowment effect in laboratory. We study differences in benchmark environments (hard closure) and an environment that allows participants to reverse the decisions taken in the laboratory (soft closure)....

Laboratory experiments are frequently used to examine the nature of individuals’ social and risk preferences and inform economic theory. However, it is unknown whether the preferences of volunteer participants are representative of the population from which the participants are drawn, or...

We investigate the external validity of giving in the dictator game by using the misdirected letter technique in a within-subject design. First, subjects participated in standard dictator games (double blind) conducted in labs in two different studies. Second, after four to five weeks (study 1)...

The house-money effect, understood as people’s tendency to be more daring with easily-gotten money, is a behavioral pattern that poses questions about the external validity of experiments in economics: to what extent do people behave in experiments like they would have in a real-life...

This paper aims at comparing the performance of three conjoint analyses (CA) in terms of estimated partworths, predictive power and estimated WTP: choice experiment (CE); ranking conjoint analysis (RCA) and best-worst scaling (BWS). Comparisons are made in a non-hypothetical setting. For...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the external and internal validity of the newly created Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) dataset. After presenting its theoretical conceptualization, we compare the IMPIC to other datasets in this policy field. Next, using a variant of principal...

Experimental evidence on a range of interventions in developing countries is accumulating rapidly. Is it possible to extrapolate from an experimental evidence base to other locations of policy interest (from "reference" to "target" sites)? And which factors determine the accuracy of such an...

Experimental evidence on a range of interventions in developing countries is accumulating rapidly. Is it possible to extrapolate from an experimental evidence base to other locations of policy interest (from “reference” to “target” sites)? And which factors determine the accuracy of such...

We study the external validity of a standard laboratory measure of cheating. The results show that cheating in the lab significantly predicts classroom misbehavior in middle and high school students.

When properly implemented, Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) can achieve a high degree of internal validity. Yet, if an RCT is to inform policy interventions that extend beyond the experimental population, it is critical to establish external validity. In this paper, we first present a...