Behavioral Economics with Mechanical Turk

Eric Waller did a quick experiment to confirm a behavioral economics hypothesis with a small amount of Mechnical Turk data. He found a paper that showed evidence that removing the minimum payment line from a credit card statement causes people to pay more (unless they typically pay the bill in full), and constructed an experiment to confirm the hypothesis.

The entire process took him only three days. I’ll let you jump over to the article to see the results!  It’s a nice example of how quickly and cheaply a short, simple experiment can be run on Turk — Waller spent a total of 3 evenings setting up the experiment, recruiting and running 200 participants, and analyzing the results.  As we’ve discussed before, Turk is a good tool for this kind of experiment.

As this kind of research becomes easier, it also makes it more likely that people will do more research like Waller’s — confirming things that they’re pretty sure are the case, but which should really be double checked, as well as fleshing out existing results a bit more precisely.  That seems like a pretty great meta-result to us.