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Social preferences in the online laboratory: a randomized experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Jérôme Hergueux  and
Nicolas Jacquemet
Jérôme Hergueux
Affiliation:
Institute of Political Studies, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France Department of Economics, Sciences Po, Paris, France Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Nicolas Jacquemet*
Affiliation:
Université de Lorraine (BETA), 13 Place Carnot, 54035 Nancy, France Paris School of Economics, Paris, France
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Internet is a very attractive technology for the implementation of experiments, both in order to obtain larger and more diverse samples and as a field of economic research in its own right. This paper reports on an experiment performed both online and in the laboratory, designed to strengthen the internal validity of decisions elicited over the Internet. We use the same subject pool, the same monetary stakes and the same decision interface, and control the assignment of subjects between the Internet and a traditional university laboratory. We apply the comparison to the elicitation of social preferences in a Public Good game, a dictator game, an ultimatum bargaining game and a trust game, coupled with an elicitation of risk aversion. This comparison concludes in favor of the reliability of behaviors elicited through the Internet. We moreover find a strong overall parallelism in the preferences elicited in the two settings. The paper also reports some quantitative differences in the point estimates, which always go in the direction of more other-regarding decisions from online subjects. This observation challenges either the predictions of social distance theory or the generally assumed increased social distance in internet interactions.

Keywords

Social experimentField experimentInternetMethodologyRandomized assignment

JEL classification

C90: General C93: Field Experiments C70: General
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 251 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9400-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Appendix – Companion treatments on the effect of the Internet specific differences in design
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