Amazon Mechanical Turk is a very widely-used tool in business and economics research, but how trustworthy are results from well-published studies that use it? Analyzing the universe of hypotheses tested on the platform and published in leading journals between 2010 and 2020 we find evidence of...

Laboratory experiments have become a wide-spread tool in economic research. Yet, there is still doubt about how well the results from lab experiments generalize to other settings. In this paper, we investigate the self-selection process of potential subjects into the subject pool. We alter the...

There are pronounced racial, ethnic, and gender gaps in income in the U.S. We investigate whether these correspond with differences in competitiveness, risk tolerance, and confidence relative to performance in a large, stratified sample of the U.S. prime-age population. We find substantial...

Social preference research has received considerable attention among economists in recent years. However, the empirical foundation of social preferences is largely based on laboratory experiments with self-selected students as participants. This is potentially problematic as students...

Modeling the incentive effects of competitions among employees for promotions or financial rewards, economists have largely ignored the effects of competition on effort provision once the competition is finished. In a laboratory experiment, we examine how competition outcomes affect the...

There is little consensus on whether women are more generous than men; some research results indicate a higher propensity towards giving of female dictators, whilst others suggest the opposite. Two explanations have been put forward. According to the first one, women are more generous than men...

Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. It has been thought since the time of Adam Smith that a firm's internal structure affects its productivity through the channel of gains from specialization. Our paper...

We provide new evidence on the extent that survey items in the Preference Survey Module and the resulting Global Preference Survey measuring social preferences − trust, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity − predict behavior in corresponding experimental games outside the original...

Laboratory experiments are frequently used to examine the nature of individual 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 whether they differ due to...

We study social preferences in the form of altruism using data on 959 interactions between random commuters at selected traffic intersections in the city of Brisbane, Australia. By observing real decisions of individual commuters on whether to stop (give way) for others, we find evidence of (i)...