Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools
American Economic Review · 2021 · Volume 111 · Issue 2
Abstract
We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire undergraduate university student population, a representative sample of the US 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 similar across samples. Furthermore, non-student samples exhibit higher levels of noise. Adding historical lab participation data, we find a small set of attributes over which lab participants differ from non-lab participants. An additional set of lab experiments shows no evidence of observer effects.
Keywords
Survey Methods, Sampling Methods, Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: General, Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
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