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What brings your subjects to the lab? A field experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Michal Krawczyk
Michal Krawczyk*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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This paper reports a field experiment involving manipulation of invitations to register in an experimental economics subject database. Two types of invitations were sent out: one emphasizing pecuniary and the other non-pecuniary benefits of participation. The former resulted in higher response rate and the strength of this treatment effect was comparable in different groups defined by gender and academic major. In a follow-up test conducted about a year later it was found that individuals recruited by invitations emphasizing monetary benefits were less willing to make an effort to participate in a non-paid survey. The very same survey also showed that they were marginally less altruistic in general.

Keywords

Experimental economicsRecruitment proceduresIncentivesSelection into experiments

JEL classification

C9: Design of Experiments
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , November 2011 , pp. 482 - 489
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NC
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 The Author(s)

Footnotes

I gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from the editor, Jordi Brandts, as well as two anonymous referees. I am also indebted to the administrative staff of the University of Warsaw who made this research possible.

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