Instructions

Journal of the Economic Science Association (2018)

58 Pages Posted: 1 Aug 2017 Last revised: 9 Nov 2018

See all articles by David Freeman

David Freeman

Simon Fraser University (SFU)

Erik O. Kimbrough

Chapman University - The George L. Argyros College of Business and Economics; Chapman University - Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy

Garrett Petersen

Simon Fraser University (SFU)

Hanh Tong

Simon Fraser University (SFU) - Department of Economics

Date Written: October 23, 2018

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 this may be an important source of noise in experimental studies.

Keywords: Attention, Comprehension, Instructions

JEL Classification: C91

Suggested Citation

Freeman, David and Kimbrough, Erik O. and Petersen, Garrett and Tong, Hanh, Instructions (October 23, 2018). Journal of the Economic Science Association (2018), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3010380 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3010380

David Freeman

Simon Fraser University (SFU) ( email )

8888 University Drive
Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6
Canada

Erik O. Kimbrough (Contact Author)

Chapman University - The George L. Argyros College of Business and Economics ( email )

One University Dr
Orange, CA 92866
United States

Chapman University - Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy ( email )

One University Drive
Orange, CA 92866
United States

Garrett Petersen

Simon Fraser University (SFU) ( email )

8888 University Drive
Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6
Canada

Hanh Tong

Simon Fraser University (SFU) - Department of Economics ( email )

8888 University Drive
Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6
Canada

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