Although the concept of randomized assignment to control for extraneous factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century, there was primarily a growing awareness of the need for careful...

Laboratory experiments were conducted to investigate how private and public information affect the selection of an innovation and the timing of adoption. The results shed light on the behavioral anomaly called the "energy-efficiency gap" in which consumers and firms delay adoption of...

In economic situations a player often has preferences regarding not only his or her own outcome but also regarding what happens to fellow players, concerns that are entirely apart from any strategic considerations. While this can be modeled directly by simply writing down a player's final...

The authors extend the standard public goods game in a variety of ways, in particular by allowing for endogenous preference over institutions and by studying the relationship between individual types, their preferences, and later behavior within the various institutional environments. They...

The authors study the responses to several questions related to real estate that were added to the Michigan Survey of Consumers in July and August 2011. In particular, they asked about attitudes toward renting versus buying a home, about commuting, and about how much to spend on a mortgage. By...

Bureaucratic performance is a crucial determinant of economic growth, but little real-world evidence exists on how to improve it, especially in resource-constrained settings. We conducted a field experiment of a social recognition intervention to improve record keeping in health facilities in...

This paper presents a new data set collected on representative samples across 6 countries: China, South Korea, Japan, Italy, the UK and the four largest states in the US. The information collected relates to work and living situations, income, behavior (such as social-distancing, hand-washing...

Disease spread is in part a function of individual behavior. We examine the factors predicting individual behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States using novel data collected by Belot et al. (2020). Among other factors, we show that people with lower income, less flexible work...