OBELISS

Randomized controlled experiments are increasingly popular across the social sciences as the gold standard for identifying causal mechanisms underlying a wide range of social phenomena including collective action, social preferences, or market behavior. Because behavioral experiments are typically conducted with small groups sampled from student populations, a common critique is that they lack both scale and external validity. This project develops facilities for online experiments with participants recruited from panel surveys, more specifically the LISS panel, a long-running, high-quality and representative panel in the Netherlands. This allows researchers to run online experiments with larger groups and representative samples, but crucially, also to capitalize on the data already available on panel respondents to enrich experimental designs with information on social-economic backgrounds, opinions, demographics, and more. The project results in a public code base to be used by researchers and panel engineers for integrating controlled online experiments in the LISS panel.