Economic Games on the Internet: The Effect of $1 Stakes

Abstract

Online labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offer an unprecedented opportunity to run economic game experiments quickly and inexpensively. Using Mturk, we recruited 756 subjects and examined their behavior in four canonical economic games, with two payoff conditions each: a stakes condition, in which subjects' earnings were based on the outcome of the game (maximum earnings of $1); and a no-stakes condition, in which subjects' earnings are unaffected by the outcome of the game. Our results demonstrate that economic game experiments run on MTurk are comparable to those run in laboratory settings, even when using very low stakes.

Gender differences in honesty: The role of social value orientation

“…One could argue that our results may not adequately replicate existing results in honesty behavior as our stakes were low. However, there is evidence that low stake-size experiments replicate data of standard laboratory experiments (e.g., Amir et al 2012). Moreover in lying games Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013) report that people show similar dishonest behavior under different stake sizes.…”

Who cooperates in repeated games: The role of altruism, inequity aversion, and demographics

“…There is considerable evidence that Mechanical Turk is a reliable platform for conducting economic game experiments (e.g. Amir et al 2012, Peysakhovich & Rand 2013, and reliability is anyway not a concern here as the recipients were merely receiving money and not making any decisions.…”

Using crowdsourced online experiments to study context-dependency of behavior

“…Inducing $1 suffices to produce outcomes similar to (typically more strongly incentivized) laboratory set-ups. Extending prior cross-national online research (Amir et al, 2012;Raihani et al, 2013) we reproduce these findings under increased methodical equivalence: To homogenize decision situations across countries we used tokens instead of currency stakes and weighted monetary endowments in accordance with purchasing power differences (cf., Roth et al, 1991).…”

“…Amir et al (2012) conducted DG, UG, Trust Game, and Public Goods Game offering a $0.4 show-up fee and stakes of $0 or $1. Their results indicate that even at $1-stakes crowdsourced online experiments generate marginal totals comparable to laboratory results.…”

“…We do not claim originality in this design for testing reproducibility of laboratory results. Others have posed similar research questions before (Amir et al, 2012;Raihani et al, 2013), and recent studies systematically compared results from crowdsourced online experiments and behavioral games in the laboratory (e.g. Hergueux and Jacquemet, 2015;Horton et al, 2011).…”