Search results

The purpose of this work is to experimentally measure trust and study its relationship to group loan allocation within a community bank.

An artefactual field experiment is run to capture a measure of trust that mimics aspects of trusting behavior in a community bank. The experimental design and empirical setting take into account risk and altruism, two known confounders of trust measures. Regression analysis is used to estimate the relationship between a novel measure of trust and the loan amount a borrower receives from their rural community bank.

The trust measure has a statistically significant, positive relationship with loan size. A one standard deviation increase in the trust measure corresponds to a 13.3 percent increase in the loan amount.

Results of the study suggest that, for community banks, trust in a borrower plays a large role in screening applicants and therefore determining loan size. Several such banks have considered graduating to commercial credit. However, given the outsize role of trust in lending decisions, it is not clear if commercial lending models – which rely less on social capital – will work.

A new trust game is developed that captures relationship-specific measures of directed trust that community bank members have towards each borrower. The trust measure is also context-specific as play in the game is analogous to how community bank members trust some borrowers (more than others) with larger loans. The emphasis on relationship- and context-specific trust measures is key to interpreting results from artefactual field experiments.

This chapter examines the external validity of lab experiments on corruption by evaluating the extent to which experimental results are robust to the degree of field context included in the experimental design. To do so, we follow Harrison and List (2004) and partition corruption experiments into four classes depending on their field context. A comparison of the results obtained within each class reveals that similar treatment effects tend to emerge. Although a definitive answer to the external validity question has yet to be provided, these preliminary results provide some support to the external validity of lab experiments on corruption.

There are several ways to define words. One is to ascertain the formal definition by looking it up in the dictionary. Another is to identify what it is that you want the word-label to differentiate.

The purpose of this study is to present a systematic methodological review of the application of field experiments in the domain of marketing research. By performing this study, the authors seek to offer necessary advice and suggestions to marketing scholars interested in the application of field experiments and to promote the adoption of field experiments as a preferred methodological choice among scholars in this domain.

A total of 315 field experiments published in the ten leading marketing journals in the past five decades were analyzed in this systematic methodological review. This study examines various aspects of field experiments, including the research profile of existing research, different trends and topics related to field experiments, choice of research questions, methods of observations, unobtrusive data collection, types of interventions and outcome variables.

This study identified various trends and topics, categories of manipulations, types of limitations and important considerations in designing field experiments and offered necessary advice on the future of field experiments in marketing research.

This study provides a complete roadmap for future marketing scholars to adopt field studies in their research plans. The systematic summary of limitations and the checklist will be helpful for the researchers to design and execute field studies more effectively and efficiently.

This review study offers a complete roadmap for marketing scholars who are interested in adopting field experiments in their research projects. The discussion of trends and topics, manipulations, limitations, design considerations and checklist items for field experiments offers relevant insights to marketing scholars and may help them design and execute field experiments more effectively and efficiently.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive methodological review of field experiments published in leading marketing journals throughout the past five decades. This study makes novel and unique contributions to both theory and literature on field experiments in the marketing discipline.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the emerging field of experimental research on entrepreneurship to better understand its development and potential.

A systematic, evidence-based literature review was applied, resulting in a sample of 47 articles having used experiments in entrepreneurship research so far. The papers are analyzed according to their topic, methods, and research design, revealing insight into their limitations and prospective contributions.

The paper discusses the potential and disadvantages of experimental methods while arguing for experiments as the method of choice for answering causality questions. This study finds a persistent increase in experimental entrepreneurship research since its introduction in 1990.

The study provides research from the field of entrepreneurship with future directions, with potential research areas and an orientation for those interested in conducting experiments.

Experiments are employed in a variety of research areas and have become more and more popular in the field of entrepreneurship. No study has analyzed the experimental studies in entrepreneurship. This paper contributes by providing an overview of the field, reflecting and discussing the outcomes while characterizing the methods employed.

Based on previous inventories, the purpose of this paper is to extend the knowledge on public administration experiments by focusing on their experimental type, design, sample type and realism levels and external validity. The aim is to provide an overview of experimental public administration and formulate potential ways forward.

The authors examine the current state of experimental public administration, by looking at a systematic selection of ISI ranked experimental publications in major public administration journals (1992-2014) and recommend ways forward based on this review.

The review indicates a rise in experimentation in public administration in recent years, this can be attributed mostly to some subfields of public administration. Furthermore, most experiments in public administration tend to have relatively simple designs, high experimental realism and a focus on external validity. Experimental public administration can be strengthened by increasing diversification in terms of samples, experimental designs, experimental types and substantive scope. Finally, the authors recommend to better utilize experiments to generate usable knowledge for practitioners and to replicate experiments to improve scientific rigour.

This paper contributes to experimental public administration by drawing on a systematic selection of papers and assessing them in depth. By means of a transparent and systematic selection of publications, various venues or ways forward are presented.

The use of behavioral insights and experimental methods has recently gained momentum among health policy-makers. There is a tendency, however, to reduce behavioral insights applications in health to “nudges,” and to reduce experiments in health to “randomized controlled trials” (RCTs). We argue that there is much more to behavioral insights and experimental methods in health economics than just nudges and RCTs. First, there is a broad and rich array of complementary experimental methods spanning the lab to the field, and all of them could prove useful in health economics. Second, there are a host of challenges in health economics, policy, and management where the application of behavioral insights and experimental methods is timely and highly promising. We illustrate this point by describing applications of experimental methods and behavioral insights to one specific topic of fundamental relevance for health research and policy: the experimental elicitation and econometric estimation of risk and time preferences. We start by reviewing the main methods of measuring risk and time preferences in health. We then focus on the “behavioral econometrics” approach to jointly elicit and estimate risk and time preferences, and we illustrate its state-of-the-art applications to health.

People’s tendency to overestimate their ability to control random events, known as illusion of control, can affect financial decisions under uncertainty. This study developed an artifactual field experiment on illusion of control for a farm machinery investment.

In an experiment with two treatments, the individual farmer was either given or not given a sense of control over a random outcome. After each decision, the authors elicited perceived control, and a questionnaire collected additional indirect measures of illusion of control from 78 German farmers and 10 farm advisors.

The results did not support preregistered hypotheses of the presence of illusion of control. This null result was robust over multiple outcomes and model specifications. The findings demonstrate that cognitive biases may be small and difficult to replicate.

The sample is not representative for the German farming population. The authors discuss why the estimated treatment effect may represent a lower bound of the true effect.

Illusion of control is well-studied in laboratory settings, but little is known about the extent to which farmers’ behavior is influenced by illusion of control.

The results of standard lab experiments have long been questioned because of the convenience samples of subjects they typically employ and the abstract nature of the lab settings. These two characteristics of experimental economics, it is argued, are the key factors that endanger the external validity of experiments.

Researchers have tried to address these issues by bringing the lab to non-traditional subjects including participants in remote locations, and/or by moving the setting of experiments closer to reality by using real goods and/or settings that are not stripped of context.

While field experiments might help experimental economists to increase the external validity of their investigations, these potential benefits might come at costs that can be considerable. Specifically, going into the field can dramatically increase the demands on, and challenges to, experimental control. This is particularly true for experiments in small-scale societies in remote locations on which I focus in this article.

If we are to examine the role of “controls” in different experimental settings, it is appropriate that the word be defined carefully. The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) defines the verb “control” in the following manner: “To exercise restraint or direction upon the free action of; to hold sway over, exercise power or authority over; to dominate, command.” So the word means something more active and interventionist than is suggested by it’s colloquial clinical usage. Control can include such mundane things as ensuring sterile equipment in a chemistry lab, to restrain the free flow of germs and unwanted particles that might contaminate some test.