Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Gruppen-Experimente nehmen an Bedeutung zu, ihre Umsetzung ist aber nicht unproblematisch. Da größere Testgruppen recht teuer werden können, sind Forscher oft auf rein aus Studenten bestehende Versuchsgruppen angewiesen, was die Ergebnisse verfälschen kann.
In den USA nutzen erste Forscher jetzt Amazons Mechanical Turk, um Experimente durchzuführen. Mit Mechanical Turk kann man für Cent-Beträge an beliebig viele Personen Kleinstaufgaben verteilen.
Mechanical Turk allows anyone to submit a set of small tasks, which are farmed out to a bunch of anonymous workers all across the world for tiny amounts of money. It tends to draw people from India, who both speak English and can make meaningful cash from completing tasks for a few dimes a piece.
How do these experiments actually play out? Researchers design experiments that mimic the kind of work people on the sites normally do -- say, labeling photos -- but with small manipulations that allow them to test economics ideas.
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Of course, for all these experiments to contribute to the existing literature, people like Rand have to prove that their work has validity in the offline world. He's confident that it does. At his talk, he'll present evidence for "why it's reasonable that the people you find on the online labor markets are representative of normal people."
Sehr spannende Sache.