Title：Peer Influences in Online Learning: A Field Experiment

Speaker: Lanfang Deng

Abstract：We study the effect of revealing peer performance information on individuals’ learning behaviors and performance. A large-scale field experiment that took place on the national online on-the-job learning platform for rural teachers in China offers an unusual opportunity to test this effect in a real-effort setting. We exploit a rich panel dataset and find that the provision of the nudge information about peers’ participation rate and learning duration leads to a 3%-5% increase in the likelihood of attending an online lecture subsequently. And the treatment effects from peers are mainly driven by knowing peers’ learning duration (at the intensity margin), rather than peers’ participation rate (at the extensity margin). Moreover, once the information was removed, the effect could persist for two periods and gradually disappear after then. In addition, our results also suggest that the treatment effect could transmit from the low-status peers to both low-status and high-status individuals. However, high-status individuals are not significantly impacted by their peers of the same status. Our results also present that the trainees with lower participation rates than peers would treat their peers as role models, increase their participation rate, and extend their learning duration. However, those trainees with higher participation rates than peers would significantly reduce learning effort. It implies that peer effects also vary with individual performance relative to peers.

About Speaker：

Lanfang Deng is an assistant professor at the School of Economics and Management in South China Normal University. Her research areas are labor economics, behavioral economics and family economics. And her articles have appeared in Regional science and Urban economics, China Economic Review, and Papers in Regional Science etc.

Date: Oct 13, 2022

Time: 12:15-13:30 Online

VooVMeeting：147-531-605