Publications
Publications
- February 2021
- American Economic Review
Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools
By: Erik Snowberg and 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
Lab Selection; External Validity; Experiments; Behavior; Surveys; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis
Citation
Snowberg, Erik, and Leeat Yariv. "Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools." American Economic Review 111, no. 2 (February 2021): 687–719.