Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/253567 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] Quantitative Economics [ISSN:] 1759-7331 [Volume:] 12 [Issue:] 1 [Publisher:] The Econometric Society [Place:] New Haven, CT [Year:] 2021 [Pages:] 251-281
Publisher: 
The Econometric Society, New Haven, CT
Abstract: 
Experimenters make theoretically irrelevant decisions concerning user interfaces and ordering or labeling of options. Reanalyzing dictator games, I first show that such decisions may drastically affect comparative statics and cause results to appear contradictory across experiments. This obstructs model testing, preference analyses, and policy predictions. I then propose a simple model of choice incorporating both presentation effects and stochastic errors, and test the model by reanalyzing the dictator game experiments. Controlling for presentation effects, preference estimates become consistent across experiments and predictive out-of-sample. This highlights both the necessity and the possibility to control for presentation in economic experiments.
Subjects: 
counterfactual predictions
laboratory experiment
Presentation effects
utility estimation
JEL: 
C10
C90
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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