UA cloudflare authentication

Research and Publications - Department of Economics, Finance & Legal Studies

Permanent URI for this collection

https://ir.ua.edu/handle/123456789/2858

Browse

Browsing Research and Publications - Department of Economics, Finance & Legal Studies by Author "Deck, Cary"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Do participation rates vary with participation payments in laboratory experiments?
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2024) Zhong, Huizhen; Deck, Cary; Henderson, Daniel
    This paper reports a series of experiments designed to evaluate how the advertised participation payment impacts participation rates in laboratory experiments. Our initial goal was to generate variation in the participation rate as a means to control for selection bias when evaluating treatment effects in common laboratory experiments. Initially, we varied the advertised participation payment to 1734 people from $5 to $15 using standard email recruitment procedures, but found no statistical evidence this impacted the participation rate. A second study increased the advertised payment up to $100. Here, we find marginally significant statistical evidence that the advertised participation payment affects the participation rate when payments are large. To combat skepticism of our results, we also conducted a third study in which verbal offers were made. Here, we found no statistically significant increase in participation rates when the participation payment increased from $5 to $10. Finally, we conducted an experiment similar to the first one at a separate university. We found no statistically significant increase in participation rates when the participation payment increased from $7 to $15. The combined results from our four experiments suggest moderate variation in the advertised participation payment from standard levels has little impact on participation rates in typical laboratory experiments. Rather, generating useful variation in participation rates likely requires much larger participation payments and/or larger potential subject pools than are common in laboratory experiments.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Pull-to-center is not just for newsvendors
    (PLOS, 2022) Brokesova, Zuzana; Deck, Cary; Peliova, Jana; University of Economics Bratislava; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    The pull-to-center effect is a systematically observed suboptimal behavior in newsvendor experiments. Various explanations have been forward for this phenomenon, some of which are based on structural properties of the task while others are based upon the inventory context of the problem. To help distinguish between these two types of explanations, we compare behavior in a newsvendor game to behavior in a new, mathematically isomorphic, price gouging game. Our laboratory experiments replicate the standard results for newsvendors and yield the equivalent pattern in the price gouging game. This suggests previously observed newsvendor behavior is driven by structural aspects of the task consistent with models like prospect theory and impulse balance rather than context specific explanations pertaining to inventory management.