The Dozen Things Experimental Economists Should Do (More of)

Abstract

What was once broadly viewed as an impossibility-learning from experimental data in economics-has now become commonplace. Governmental bodies, think tanks, and corporations around the world employ teams of experimental researchers to answer their most pressing questions. For their part, in the past two decades academics have begun to more actively partner with organizations to generate data via field experimentation. While this revolution in evidence-based approaches has served to deepen the economic science, recently a credibility crisis has caused even the most

Physician Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence

“…Finally, the fact that subjects are aware of being part of a study might imply some scrutiny which potentially affects decisions (Levitt andList, 2007, 2009;Czibor et al, 2019). To minimize such potential effects, we implemented a double-blind procedure in our experiment.…”

“…We also link individual physicians' behavior to administrative data about their practice characteristics to address potential heterogeneity in individuals' health service provision and the quality of care in the experiment. We thus explore how experimental behavior relates to physicians' real-world characteristics and contribute to the generalizability of experimental results (Levitt andList, 2007, 2009; Czibor et al, 2019). The practice characteristics we consider comprise annual practice profit, location (city, outer conurbation, rural area), patient-related characteristics (share of patients in the statutory health insurance (SHI) scheme, revenue share, and time spent on SHI patients), 6 and whether more than one physician is employed in the practice.…”

Implementing Educational Interventions at Scale

“…In a randomized controlled trial among 6,976 students in 12 schools, Bergman and Rogers (2017) use automated text message alerts to inform parents if their child had a missing assignment, a class absence, or a low average course grade. They found effects of information on GPA of about .06 of the standard deviations of the control group at baseline.…”

“…Parents play an important role in the educational development of their children. An increasing number of field experiments have demonstrated that interventions aimed at involving parents in supporting their children's learning can have positive effects (e.g., Bergman, 2019;Bergman & Chan, 2019;Bergman & Rogers, 2017;York et al, 2019). The evidence on the effectiveness of these early interventions suggests that there could be substantial returns from investing in parent-targeted educational programs at a large scale.…”

Implementing Educational Interventions at Scale

“…Parents play an important role in the educational development of their children. An increasing number of field experiments have demonstrated that interventions aimed at involving parents in supporting their children's learning can have positive effects (e.g., Bergman, 2019;Bergman & Chan, 2019;Bergman & Rogers, 2017;York et al, 2019). The evidence on the effectiveness of these early interventions suggests that there could be substantial returns from investing in parent-targeted educational programs at a large scale.…”