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Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

Author

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  • Erik Snowberg
  • 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Erik Snowberg & Leeat Yariv, 2018. "Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools," CESifo Working Paper Series 7136, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7136
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    JEL classification:

    • B41 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - Economic Methodology
    • C80 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology; Computer Programs - - - General
    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General

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