Many Designs: Competition and Moral Behavior

With #ManyDesigns we are running the first crowd-sourced project in behavioral economics!

In research teams (RTs) of two, everyone – from PhD student to full professor from around the world – will have the possibility to propose an experimental research design, all assessing the same research question:

Does competition affect moral behavior?

The project coordinators (PCs) will use the results of #ManyDesigns to learn about the scientific process and how competition affects moral behavior. They will study the variation in design choices and results, and write a metascience paper on the topic where all contributors whose design proposals were run will also be included as co-authors.

Procedure

With successful registration, there are six stages in #ManyDesigns : registration, submission of design proposals via a pre-registration, implementation of the experiment, peer assessment, data analysis, and writing of the paper.

1. Registration
1. Research teams (RTs) sign up for taking part in this study (without yet submitting a research design)
2. Project coordinators (PCs) pre-screen applications for adherence with the eligibility conditions and invite all eligible RTs to submit a pre-registration outlining their design proposal.
2. Design submission and selection procedure
1. PCs pre-screen all submitted designs for adherence with the design conditions.
2. Invited RTs submit a pre-registration outlining their experimental research design proposal.
3. If more than 50 design proposals are eligible, 50 designs will be randomly selected for being included in the study.
3. Experimental implementation
• All selected designs will be implemented as online experiments using Prolific, payed for by the PCs.
• All selected RTs program the experimental software for their design proposal themselves.
• All selected RTs host the experimental software for their design proposal on their own servers.
4. Peer assessment: All members of the selected RTs will assess 10 other RTs' design propsals.
5. Analysis
• RTs will submit their raw data and give PCs access to the server on which the experiment is hosted.
• PCs will analyze the data as specified in RTs' respective pre-registrations.
• PCs will analyze the data as specified in the PCs' pre-analysis plan.
6. PCs will write a metascience paper; all members of selected RTs will be co-authors.

Participation criteria and researcher tasks. Learn more about the participation criteria and tasks for the research teams.

Project coordinators. The project will be coordinated by researchers from the Stockholm School of Economics, the University of Innsbruck, and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Meet the project coordinators.

Pre-analysis plan. Before inviting RTs to the study a pre-analysis plan (PAP) was uploaded outlining the design of the study. This frozen "pre-analysis plan" was uploaded to the Open Science Framework on April 28, 2021. Once all RTs have submitted their pre-registrations of their designs, but before the data collection starts, we will specify a standardized way to analyze the data and the exact hypotheses and tests as an addendum to the initial PAP.