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...

Consumer researchers seeking to explain the probability of a binary outcome in an experiment often attend to the moderation of one treatment variable's effect by the value of second. The most commonly used method for analyzing such data is logistic regression, but because this method subjects...

The authors examine the role of reference prices in a unique form of gift giving behavior - gift registries. A Hierarchical Bayesian analysis of fulfillment data from 555 online wedding registries and results from a laboratory experiment reveal that gift fulfillment probability follows a bimodal...

Despite the widespread adoption of recommender systems by online investment platforms, empirical research into their impact on online investors’ behaviors is scarce. Using data from a global e-commerce platform, the authors of this study adopt a regression discontinuity design and causally...

This paper studies the effect of sales tax changes on internet and catalog sales. We collect sales data from a retailer that sells its products through its internet and catalog channels. We analyze the retailer's sales before and after a major tax cut in one of the largest metropolitan areas in...