Abstract

A rapidly growing number of behavioral researchers use online experiments to study human decision making. Online labor markets, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Prolific, allow researchers to conveniently recruit participants for their experiments and to compensate them for their efforts. However, online experiments have been typically limited to non-interactive tasks. I introduce LIONESS Lab, a free web-based platform that enables experimenters to develop, test, run and share their interactive experiments online. It requires only minimal programming skills to develop own interactive experiments and to conduct sessions with online participants who interact using their web browsers. In the seminar, we will conduct a live interactive online experiment running in the U.S. and we will discuss methodological challenges to run experiments online. LIONESS Lab comes with ‘best practices’ for, e.g., preventing participants to enter a session more than once, facilitating on-the-fly formation of interaction groups, reducing waiting times for participants, driving down attrition by retaining attention of online participants and, importantly, adequate handling of cases in which participants drop out.