The goal of the paper is to set forth general guidelines that we believe would enhance the usefulness of future social experiments and to suggest ways of correcting for inherent limitations of them. Although the major motivation for an experiment is to overcome the inherent limitations of...

The goal of the paper is to set forth general guidelines that we believe would enhance the usefulness of future social experiments and to suggest ways of correcting for inherent limitations of them. Although the major motivation for an experiment is to overcome the inherent limitations of...

Since 1970 the United States government has spent over half a billion dollars on social experiments intended to assess the effect of potential tax policies, health insurance plans, housing subsidies, and other programs. Was it worth it? Was anything learned from these experiments that could not...

Although fake online customer reviews have become prevalent on platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, little is known about how these reviews influence consumer behavior. This paper provides the first experimental estimates of the effects of fake reviews on individual demand and...

Coal heating in residential homes is an important source of indoor air pollution, leading to detrimental health effects. We conduct a randomized field experiment in northern China using three types of SMS campaigns targeting three potential biases that may hinder the adoption of electric...

We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), which primarily provide consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback (RTF),...

Given police abolitionism's new visibility after the 2020 racial justice protests, we assess stakeholder beliefs on the protests' stock impacts on police-affiliated firms. Experts generally underestimate the firms' stock gains, except situated experts like community organizers and police...

When economists analyze a well-conducted RCT or natural experiment and find a statistically significant effect, they conclude the null of no effect is unlikely to be true. But how frequently is this conclusion warranted? The answer depends on the proportion of tested nulls that are true and the...