Full length article
Prolific.ac—A subject pool for online experiments

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2017.12.004Get rights and content
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Abstract

The number of online experiments conducted with subjects recruited via online platforms has grown considerably in the recent past. While one commercial crowdworking platform – Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – basically has established and since dominated this field, new alternatives offer services explicitly targeted at researchers. In this article, we present www.prolific.ac and lay out its suitability for recruiting subjects for social and economic science experiments. After briefly discussing key advantages and challenges of online experiments relative to lab experiments, we trace the platform’s historical development, present its features, and contrast them with requirements for different types of social and economic experiments.

JEL classification

C93
C81
B41

Keywords

Prolific
Online experiment
Subject pool

Cited by (0)

The authors thank the team of Prolific.ac for providing detailed information about their platform, including utilization data. Funding by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (START-Grant Y617-G11 Kirchler) is gratefully acknowledged. Disclaimer: None of the authors is affiliated with Prolific.ac or received any compensation, financial or otherwise, for authoring this paper.