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Session-effects in the laboratory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Guillaume R. Fréchette
Guillaume R. Fréchette*
Affiliation:
New York University, New York, USA
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In experimental economics, where subjects participate in different sessions, observations across subjects of a given session might exhibit more correlation than observations across subjects in different sessions. The main goal of this paper is to clarify what are session-effects: what can cause them, what forms they can take, and what are the potential problems. It will be shown that standard solutions are at times inadequate, and that their properties are sometimes misunderstood.

Keywords

Session-effectsData analysisHypothesis testsExperimental designUnit of observationMatching procedure
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 485 - 498
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

I wish to thank the editor and two anonymous referees, Marina Agranov, Jeffrey Carpenter, Gary Charness, Yan Chen, Vincent Crawford, Pedro Dal Bó, Mark Dean, John Duffy, Martin Dufwenberg, Drew Fudenberg, John Ham, Burkhard Schipper, Andrew Schotter, Chloé Tergiman, Kevin Thom, Isabel Treviño, and Emanuel Vespa for helpful comments and the NSF via grants SES-0519045, SES-0721111, and SES-0924780, and the Center for Experimental Social Science (CESS) for their financial support.

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