American Economic Review Vol. 108 No. 11 2018

Measuring and Bounding Experimenter Demand

Jonathan de Quidt¹; Johannes Haushofer²; Christopher Roth³

¹ Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden, and CESifo (email: ) · ² Department of Psychology and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 427 Peretsman-Scully Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540, NBER, and Busara Center for Behavioral Economics (email: ) · ³ Department of Economics, University of Oxford, Keble College, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PG, United Kingdom, and CSAE (email: )

Abstract

We propose a technique for assessing robustness to demand effects of findings from experiments and surveys. The core idea is that by deliberately inducing demand in a structured way we can bound its influence. We present a model in which participants respond to their beliefs about the researcher’s objectives. Bounds are obtained by manipulating those beliefs with “demand treatments.” We apply the method to 11 classic tasks, and estimate bounds averaging 0.13 standard deviations, suggesting that typical demand effects are probably modest. We also show how to compute demand-robust treatment effects and how to structurally estimate the model.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20171330

Volume

108

Issue

11

Pages

3266-3302

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

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