Incentives in Experiments: A Theoretical Analysis

By Yaron Azrieli, Christopher P. Chambers, Paul J. Healy. Journal of Political Economy, 2018

279 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Experimental economists currently lack a convention for how to pay subjects in experiments with multiple tasks. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing this question. Assuming statewise monotonicity and nothing else, we prove that paying for one randomly chosen problem—the random problem selection mechanism—is essentially the only incentive compatible mechanism. Paying for every period is similarly justified when we assume only a “no complementarities at the top” condition. To help experimenters decide which is appropriate for their particular experiment, we discuss empirical tests of these two assumptions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e94b67f8c93a294f89a455d14b5c2086886af99

Citations in the corpus

• Contagion of pro- and anti-social behavior among peers and the role of social proximity (2019, unknown): “This incentive scheme is in line with suggestions made by Charness et al. (2016) and retains incentive compatibility as theoretically argued by Healy et al. (2016).”
• Good news and bad news are still news: experimental evidence on belief updating (2019, unknown): “Incentive compatibility is preserved assuming a state-wise monotonicity assumption, which is required whenever one pays for one randomly selected decision, see Azrieli et al. (2018).”