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Instructions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

David J. Freeman ,
Erik O. Kimbrough ,
Garrett M. Petersen  and
Hanh T. Tong
David J. Freeman*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Dr, Burnaby, BC V5S 1A6, Canada
Erik O. Kimbrough
Affiliation:
Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, Chapman University, One University Drive, Orange, CA 92866, USA
Garrett M. Petersen
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Dr, Burnaby, BC V5S 1A6, Canada
Hanh T. Tong
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Dr, Burnaby, BC V5S 1A6, Canada
*
e-mail: david_freeman@sfu.ca
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Abstract

A survey of instruction delivery and reinforcement methods in recent laboratory experiments reveals a wide and inconsistently reported variety of practices and limited research evaluating their effectiveness. Thus, we experimentally compare how methods of delivering and reinforcing experiment instructions impact subjects’ comprehension and retention of payoff-relevant information. We report a one-shot individual decision task in which non-money-maximizing behavior can be unambiguously identified and find that such behavior is prevalent in our baseline treatment which uses plain, but relatively standard experimental instructions. We find combinations of reinforcement methods that can eliminate half of non-money-maximizing behavior, and we find that we can induce a similar reduction via enhancements to the content of instructions. Residual non-money-maximizing behavior suggests that this may be an important source of noise in experimental studies.

Keywords

AttentionComprehensionInstructions

JEL classification

C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior
Type
Methodology Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , December 2018 , pp. 165 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0059-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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