John A List
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 932183 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | John A List |
| NOMBRES | John A |
| APELLIDO | List |
| FIRMA | LIST J A |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1740-3848 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 69 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 588 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 67 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1998 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Why Don’t Struggling Students Do Their Homework? Disentangling Motivation and Study Productivity as Drivers of Human Capital Formation
The Economics of Scaling Early Childhood Programs
Research Registries and the Credibility Crisis
We analyze one prominent policy solution to the credibility crisis in experimental research—research registries—with primary focus on the AEA RCT Registry. We find that the AEA RCT Registry has had a limited impact to date. A majority of recent economics experiments are not registered, only about half of those registered did so prior to intervention, and most of these preregistrations lack sufficient detail. We find broad similarities when compar…
Towards an Understanding of Reference-Dependent Labour Supply
We experimentally study the effects of transitory incentives and income predicted by models of reference-dependent labour supply. Visiting an open-air market in India, we induce experimental variation in: (i) incentives by offering vendors a supplemental wage over the course of two days and (ii) income by, one morning, administering a substantial overpayment for a good sold in the market. We find that incentives have a staggered effect on hours w…
The next generation of experimental research with LLMs
Policy evaluation and the causal analysis of public support
Support for initially unpopular policies may grow over time
The Voltage Effect
Les entreprises, les gouvernements et les particuliers ont eu à faire face à la mise à l’échelle de leurs idées, parfois avec succès, mais trop souvent sans succès. Le passage à l’échelle est au cœur de mon livre The Voltage Effect (2022). Dans ce livre et dans cet article, je cherche à expliciter ce que j’ai appris en utilisant l’économie pour comprendre le monde. L’article commence par décrire les origines de mon travail sur la mise à l’échelle…
Detecting Drivers of Behavior at an Early Age
We use field experiments with nearly 900 children to investigate how skills developed at ages 3-5 drive later-life outcomes. We find that skills map onto three distinct factors - cognitive skills, executive functions, and economic preferences. Returning to the children up to 7 years later, we find that executive functions, but not cognitive skills, predict the likelihood of receiving disciplinary referrals. Economic preferences have an independen…
Multiple testing with covariate adjustment in experimental economics
This paper provides a framework for testing multiple null hypotheses simultaneously using experimental data in which simple random sampling is used to assign treatment status to units. Using general results from the multiple testing literature, we develop under weak assumptions a procedure that (i) asymptotically controls the familywise error rate—the probability of one or more false rejections—and (ii) is asymptotically balanced in that the marg…
Incentives to Eat Healthily
We use a field experiment with over 200 participants to investigate the effect of incentives on grocery store purchases. We randomize participants to treatments where we incentivize produce purchases, provide tips for produce preparation, or both, and follow shopping behaviour for 6 months. Our informational treatment has a weak effect. However, we find an important price effect: modest incentives quadruple produce purchasing at our grocery store…
Toward An Understanding of the Economics of Apologies
We use a theory of apologies to design a nationwide field experiment involving 1.5 million Uber ridesharing consumers who experienced late rides. Several insights emerge. First, apologies are not a panacea—the efficacy of an apology and whether it may backfire depend on how the apology is made. Second, across treatments, money speaks louder than words—the best form of apology is to include a coupon for a future trip. Third, in some cases sending …
The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy
The growth of the “gig” economy generates worker flexibility that, some have speculated, will favour women. We explore this by examining labour supply choices and earnings among more than a million rideshare drivers on Uber in the U.S. We document a roughly 7% gender earnings gap amongst drivers. We show that this gap can be entirely attributed to three factors: experience on the platform (learning-by-doing), preferences and constraints over wher…
An experimental test of fundraising appeals targeting donor and recipient benefits
We partnered with Alaska's Pick.Click.Give. programme to implement a statewide natural field experiment with 540,000 Alaskans designed to examine two of the main motivations for charitable giving: concerns for the benefits to self (impure altruism or 'warm glow') or concerns for the benefits to others (pure altruism). Our empirical results highlight the relative importance of appeals to self: individuals who received such an appeal were 6.6% more…
A rejoinder
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How can experiments play a greater role in public policy? Twelve proposals from an economic model of scaling
Policymakers are increasingly turning to insights gained from the experimental method as a means to inform large-scale public policies. Critics view this increased usage as premature, pointing to the fact that many experimentally tested programs fail to deliver their promise at scale. Under this view, the experimental approach drives too much public policy. Yet, if policymakers could be more confident that the original research findings would be …
Toward an Understanding of the Welfare Effects of Nudges
Social scientists have recently explored how framing of gains and losses affects productivity. We conducted a field experiment in peri-urban Uganda, and compared output levels across 1,000 workers over isomorphic tasks and incentives, framed as either losses or gains. We find that loss aversion can be leveraged to increase the productivity of labour. The estimated welfare costs of using the loss contract are quite modest—perhaps because the loss …
Multiple hypothesis testing in experimental economics
The analysis of data from experiments in economics routinely involves testing multiple null hypotheses simultaneously. These different null hypotheses arise naturally in this setting for at least three different reasons: when there are multiple outcomes of interest and it is desired to determine on which of these outcomes a treatment has an effect; when the effect of a treatment may be heterogeneous in that it varies across subgroups defined by o…
The Impact of Management Practices on Employee Productivity
Increasing evidence indicates the importance of management in determining firms' productivity. Yet causal evidence regarding the effectiveness of management practices is scarce, especially for skilled labor in the developed world. In a field experiment measuring commercial airline captains’ productivity, we test four distinct management practices: performance monitoring, performance feedback, target setting, and prosocial incentives. These practi…
The Effect of Early-Childhood Education on Social Preferences
We present results from the first study to examine the causal impact of early childhood education on the social preferences of children. We compare children who, at 3-4 years old, were randomized into either a full-time preschool, a parenting program, or a control group. We returned to the children when they reached 6-8 years of age and conducted a series of incentivized experiments to elicit their social preferences. We find that early childhood…
How natural field experiments have enhanced our understanding of unemployment
Combining behavioral economics and field experiments to reimagine early childhood education
Behavioral economics and field experiments within the social sciences have advanced well beyond academic curiosum. Governments around the globe as well as the most powerful firms in modern economies employ staffs of behavioralists and experimentalists to advance and test best practices. In this study, we combine behavioral economics with field experiments to reimagine a new model of early childhood education. Our approach has three distinct featu…
Voting to Tell Others
Why do people vote? We design a field experiment to estimate a model of voting “because others will ask”. The expectation of being asked motivates turnout if individuals derive pride from telling others that they voted, or feel shame from admitting that they did not vote, provided that lying is costly. In a door-to-door survey about election turnout, we experimentally vary (1) the informational content and use of a flyer pre-announcing the survey…
The behavioralist as tax collector
Experimental Economics in the Journal of Political Economy
To Replicate or Not to Replicate? Exploring Reproducibility in Economics through the Lens of a Model and a Pilot Study
The sciences are in an era of an alleged ‘credibility crisis.’ In this study, we discuss the reproducibility of received empirical results, focusing on economics research. By combining theory and empirical evidence, we discuss the import of replication studies, and whether they improve our confidence in novel findings. The theory sheds light on the importance of replications, even when replications themselves are subject to research biases. We th…
What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World
A critical question facing experimental economists is whether behavior inside the laboratory is a good indicator of behavior outside the laboratory. To address that question, we build a model in which the choices that individuals make depend not just on financial implications, but also on the nature and extent of scrutiny by others, the particular context in which a decision is embedded, and the manner in which participants and tasks are selected…
Redefine statistical significance
On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games
The dictator game represents a workhorse within experimental economics, frequently used to test theory and to provide insights into the prevalence of social preferences. This study explores more closely the dictator game and the literatureâ€TMs preferred interpretation of its meaning by collecting data from nearly 200 dictators across treatments that varied the action set and the origin of endowment. The action set variation includes choices in w…
The Effects of Seed Money and Refunds on Charitable Giving
We design a field experiment to test two theories of fund-raising for threshold public goods: Andreoni predicts that publicly announced "seed money" will increase charitable donations, whereas Bagnoli and Lipman predict a similar increase for a refund policy. Experimentally manipulating a solicitation of 3,000 households for a university capital campaign produced data confirming both predictions. Increasing seed money from 10 percent to 67 percen…
The Behavioralist Meets the Market
The role of the market in mitigating and mediating various forms of behavior is perhaps the central issue facing behavioral economics today. This study designs a field experiment that is explicitly linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine whether, and to what extent, social preferences influence outcomes in actual market transactions. While agents drawn from a well-functioning marketplace behave in accord with social preference mod…
Ode to the Sea
Journal Article Ode to the Sea: Workplace Organizations and Norms of Cooperation Get access Uri Gneezy, Uri Gneezy University of California San Diego and University of Amsterdam Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Andreas Leibbrandt, Andreas Leibbrandt Monash University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar John A. List John A. List University of Chicago and Monash University…
Handbook on Experimental Economics and the Environment
Contents: Introduction: Experimental Approaches to Environmental Economics John A. List and Michael K. Price PART I: ECONOMETRIC APPROACHES FOR EXPERIMENTAL DATA 1. Quasi-Experiments and Hedonic Property Value Methods Christopher F. Parmeter and Jaren C. Pope 2. Institutional Heterogeneity in Social Dilemma Games: A Bayesian Examination Klaus Moeltner, James J. Murphy, John K. Stranlund and Maria Alejandra Velez 3. Analyzing Repeated-Game Economi…
To Replicate or Not to Replicate? Exploring Reproducibility in Economics through the Lens of a Model and a Pilot Study
The sciences are in an era of an alleged ‘credibility crisis.’ In this study, we discuss the reproducibility of received empirical results, focusing on economics research. By combining theory and empirical evidence, we discuss the import of replication studies, and whether they improve our confidence in novel findings. The theory sheds light on the importance of replications, even when replications themselves are subject to research biases. We th…
The Effect of Early-Childhood Education on Social Preferences
We present results from the first study to examine the causal impact of early childhood education on the social preferences of children. We compare children who, at 3-4 years old, were randomized into either a full-time preschool, a parenting program, or a control group. We returned to the children when they reached 6-8 years of age and conducted a series of incentivized experiments to elicit their social preferences. We find that early childhood…
Why Economists Should Conduct Field Experiments and 14 Tips for Pulling One Off
In this introduction to the symposium, I first offer an overview of the spectrum of experimental methods in economics, from laboratory experiments to the field experiments that are the subject of this symposium. I then offer some thoughts about the potential gains from doing economic research using field experiments and my own mental checklist of 14 steps to improve the chances of carrying out an economics field experiment successfully
The Market for Charitable Giving
Through good and bad economic times, charitable gifts have continued to roll in largely unabated over the past half century. In a typical year, total charitable gifts of money now exceed 2 percent of gross domestic product. Moreover, charitable giving has nearly doubled in real terms since 1990, and the number of nonprofit organizations registered with the IRS grew by nearly 60 percent from 1995 to 2005. This study provides a perspective on the e…
Young, Selfish and Male
This study examines social preferences in three distinct field environments. In the first field setting, I allow consumers of all age and education levels to participate in one-shot and multiple-shot public goods games in a well-functioning marketplace. The second field study, an actual university capital campaign, gathers data from mail solicitations sent to 2,000 Central Florida residents. In the third field experiment, I examine data from an u…
The Impact of Management Practices on Employee Productivity
Increasing evidence indicates the importance of management in determining firms' productivity. Yet causal evidence regarding the effectiveness of management practices is scarce, especially for skilled labor in the developed world. In a field experiment measuring commercial airline captains’ productivity, we test four distinct management practices: performance monitoring, performance feedback, target setting, and prosocial incentives. These practi…
Testing Neoclassical Competitive Theory in Multilateral Decentralized Markets
Walrasian tâtonnement has been a fundamental assumption in economics ever since Walras’ general equilibrium theory was introduced in 1874. Nearly a century after its introduction, Vernon Smith relaxed the Walrasian tâtonnement assumption by showing that neoclassical competitive market theory explains the equilibrating forces in “double‐auction” markets. I make a next step in this evolution by exploring the predictive power of neoclassical theory …
Toward An Understanding of the Economics of Apologies
We use a theory of apologies to design a nationwide field experiment involving 1.5 million Uber ridesharing consumers who experienced late rides. Several insights emerge. First, apologies are not a panacea—the efficacy of an apology and whether it may backfire depend on how the apology is made. Second, across treatments, money speaks louder than words—the best form of apology is to include a coupon for a future trip. Third, in some cases sending …
How can experiments play a greater role in public policy? Twelve proposals from an economic model of scaling
Policymakers are increasingly turning to insights gained from the experimental method as a means to inform large-scale public policies. Critics view this increased usage as premature, pointing to the fact that many experimentally tested programs fail to deliver their promise at scale. Under this view, the experimental approach drives too much public policy. Yet, if policymakers could be more confident that the original research findings would be …
Naturally Occurring Markets and Exogenous Laboratory Experiments
We examine the relevance of experimental findings from laboratory settings that abstract from the field context of the task that theory purports to explain. Using common value auction theory as our guide, we identify naturally occurring settings in which one can test the theory. Experienced agents bidding in familiar roles do not fall prey to the winner's curse. Yet, experienced agents fall prey to the winner's curse when bidding in an unfamiliar…
Toward an Understanding of the Welfare Effects of Nudges
Social scientists have recently explored how framing of gains and losses affects productivity. We conducted a field experiment in peri-urban Uganda, and compared output levels across 1,000 workers over isomorphic tasks and incentives, framed as either losses or gains. We find that loss aversion can be leveraged to increase the productivity of labour. The estimated welfare costs of using the loss contract are quite modest—perhaps because the loss …
Toward an Understanding of Learning by Doing
Productivity improvements within establishments (e.g., factories, mines, or retail stores) are an important source of aggregate productivity growth. Past research has documented that learning by doing-productivity improvements that occur in concert with production increases-is one source of such improvements. Yet little is known about the specific mechanisms through which such learning occurs. We address this question using extremely detailed dat…
A Test of Diminishing Marginal Value
The notion of diminishing marginal value had a profound impact on the development of neoclassical theory. Early neoclassical scholars had difficulty convincing contemporaries of the new paradigm's value until political economists used the critical assumption of diminishing marginal value to link utility and demand. While diminishing marginal value remains a key component of modern economic intuition, there is little direct verification of this be…
Beggar thy Neighbor
Measuring the effects of air quality regulations on “dirty” firm births
Detecting Drivers of Behavior at an Early Age
We use field experiments with nearly 900 children to investigate how skills developed at ages 3-5 drive later-life outcomes. We find that skills map onto three distinct factors - cognitive skills, executive functions, and economic preferences. Returning to the children up to 7 years later, we find that executive functions, but not cognitive skills, predict the likelihood of receiving disciplinary referrals. Economic preferences have an independen…
An experimental test of fundraising appeals targeting donor and recipient benefits
We partnered with Alaska's Pick.Click.Give. programme to implement a statewide natural field experiment with 540,000 Alaskans designed to examine two of the main motivations for charitable giving: concerns for the benefits to self (impure altruism or 'warm glow') or concerns for the benefits to others (pure altruism). Our empirical results highlight the relative importance of appeals to self: individuals who received such an appeal were 6.6% more…
Scaling for Economists
Economists often conduct experiments that demonstrate the benefits to individuals of modifying their behavior, such as using a new production process at work or investing in energy saving technologies. A common occurrence is for the success of the intervention in these small-scale studies to diminish substantially when applied at a larger scale, severely undermining the optimism advertised in the original research studies. One key contributor to …
A method for valuing global ecosystem services
The environmental Kuznets curve
The Effects of Environmental Regulations on Foreign Direct Investment
Measuring the effects of air quality regulations on "dirty" firm births
Measuring the effects of air quality regulations on “dirty” firm births
What Experimental Protocol Influence Disparities Between Actual and Hypothetical Stated Values?
Gender differences in revealed risk taking
Beggar thy Neighbor
The Effects of Seed Money and Refunds on Charitable Giving
We design a field experiment to test two theories of fund-raising for threshold public goods: Andreoni predicts that publicly announced "seed money" will increase charitable donations, whereas Bagnoli and Lipman predict a similar increase for a refund policy. Experimentally manipulating a solicitation of 3,000 households for a university capital campaign produced data confirming both predictions. Increasing seed money from 10 percent to 67 percen…
Cigarette demand
Estimating elasticities of cigarette demand has become commonplace amongst economists and policymakers. Synthesizing the various elasticities into a coherent message is quite challenging, however, as the point estimates are obtained using quite disparate modeling techniques and data. In this study, we perform a meta‐analysis to explore factors that influence variations within and across studies. Empirical results suggest that demand specification…
Does Market Experience Eliminate Market Anomalies?
This study examines individual behavior in two well-functioning marketplaces to investigate whether market experience eliminates the endowment effect. Field evidence from both markets suggests that individual behavior converges to the neoclassical prediction as market experience increases. In an experimental test of whether these observations are due to treatment (market experience) or selection (e.g., static preferences), I find that market expe…
The Environmental Kuznets Curve
We explore the importance of modeling strategies when estimating the emissions-income relationship. Using U.S. state-level panel data on nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions, we estimate several environmental Kuznets curves using the standard parametric framework as well as a more flexible semiparametric alternative. Formal statistical comparisons of the results overwhelmingly reject the parametric approach. Moreover, the differences, part…
Effects of Environmental Regulations on Manufacturing Plant Births
This study examines the effects of air quality regulation on economic activity. Anecdotal evidence and some recent empirical studies suggest that an inverse relationship exists between the stringency of environmental regulations and new plant formations. Using a unique county-level data set for New York State from 1980 to 1990, we revisit this conjecture using a seminonparametric method based on propensity score matching. Our empirical estimates …
Field Experiments
Experimental economists are leaving the reservation. They are recruiting subjects in the field rather than in the classroom, using field goods rather than induced valuations, and using field context rather than abstract terminology in instructions. We argue that there is something methodologically fundamental behind this trend. Field experiments differ from laboratory experiments in many ways. Although it is tempting to view field experiments as …
The Hidden Costs and Returns of Incentives—Trust and Trustworthiness among Ceos
We examine experimentally how Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) respond to incentives and how they provide incentives in situations requiring trust and trustworthiness. As a control we compare the behavior of CEOs with the behavior of students. We find that CEOs are considerably more trusting and exhibit more trustworthiness than students—thus reaching substantially higher efficiency levels than students. Moreover, we find that, for CEOs as well as…
Neoclassical Theory Versus Prospect Theory
Several experimental studies have provided evidence that suggest indifference curves have a kink around the current endowment level. These results, which clearly contradict closely held economic doctrines, have led some influential commentators to call for an entirely new economic paradigm to displace conventional neoclassical theory—e.g., prospect theory, which invokes psychological effects. This paper pits neoclassical theory against prospect t…
The Nature and Extent of Discrimination in the Marketplace
Empirical studies have provided evidence that discrimination exists in various markets, but they rarely allow the analyst to draw conclusions concerning the nature of discrimination. By combining data from bilateral negotiations in the Sportscard market with complementary field experiments, this study provides a framework that amends this shortcoming. The experimental design, which includes data gathered from more than 1100 market participants, p…
Effects of environmental regulation on foreign and domestic plant births
Testing Neoclassical Competitive Theory in Multilateral Decentralized Markets
Walrasian tâtonnement has been a fundamental assumption in economics ever since Walras’ general equilibrium theory was introduced in 1874. Nearly a century after its introduction, Vernon Smith relaxed the Walrasian tâtonnement assumption by showing that neoclassical competitive market theory explains the equilibrating forces in “double‐auction” markets. I make a next step in this evolution by exploring the predictive power of neoclassical theory …
Young, Selfish and Male
This study examines social preferences in three distinct field environments. In the first field setting, I allow consumers of all age and education levels to participate in one-shot and multiple-shot public goods games in a well-functioning marketplace. The second field study, an actual university capital campaign, gathers data from mail solicitations sent to 2,000 Central Florida residents. In the third field experiment, I examine data from an u…
Putting Behavioral Economics to Work
Recent discoveries in behavioral economics have led scholars to question the underpinnings of neoclassical economics. We use insights gained from one of the most influential lines of behavioral research—gift exchange—in an attempt to maximize worker effort in two quite distinct tasks: data entry for a university library and door-to-door fundraising for a research center. In support of the received literature, our field evidence suggests that work…
Friend or Foe? A Natural Experiment of the Prisoner's Dilemma
This study examines data drawn from the game show Friend or Foe? which is similar to the classic prisoner's dilemma tale: partnerships are endogenously determined, and players work together to earn money, after which they play a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game over large stakes: varying from $200 to (potentially) more than $22,000. The data reveal several interesting insights; perhaps most provocatively, they suggest that even though the game is…
The Behavioralist Meets the Market
The role of the market in mitigating and mediating various forms of behavior is perhaps the central issue facing behavioral economics today. This study designs a field experiment that is explicitly linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine whether, and to what extent, social preferences influence outcomes in actual market transactions. While agents drawn from a well-functioning marketplace behave in accord with social preference mod…
Does Price Matter in Charitable Giving? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment
We conducted a natural field experiment to further our understanding of the economics of charity. Using direct mail solicitations to over 50,000 prior donors of a nonprofit organization, we tested the effectiveness of a matching grant on charitable giving. We find that the match offer increases both the revenue per solicitation and the response rate. Larger match ratios (i.e., $3:$1 and $2:$1) relative to a smaller match ratio ($1:$1) had no addi…
On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games
The dictator game represents a workhorse within experimental economics, frequently used to test theory and to provide insights into the prevalence of social preferences. This study explores more closely the dictator game and the literatureâ€TMs preferred interpretation of its meaning by collecting data from nearly 200 dictators across treatments that varied the action set and the origin of endowment. The action set variation includes choices in w…
Economics (56 obras) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (38 obras) · Psychology (26 obras) · Microeconomics (23 obras) · Computer Science (22 obras) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (19 obras) · Mathematics (18 obras) · Business (17 obras) · Political science (16 obras) · Social Psychology (15 obras)