'Retirement Experiments - Güth, Strobel, Anderhub and Müller'
(AsPredicted #84384)

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1) Have any data been collected for this study already?
No, no data have been collected for this study yet.

2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study?
This study attempt to partially replicate a modified-design experiment from Anderhub, Güth, Müller and Strobel - "An experimental analysis of intertemporal allocation behavior" (2000, Experimental Economics)

We study how subjects, facing a life with stochastic termination probabilities, react and adjust their consumption as termination probabilities are updated over time.

3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured.
Consumption decision, in points, for each period.

4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to?
Two between-subject treatments on lifetime utility form: summation and product of all period-utility for periods before termination.

5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis.
Following the original paper, we will use binomial tests to check whether subjects adjust consumption at periods 2 and 3 based on the (partial) resolution of uncertainty on termination probabilities (conditions (1) and (2), leading to Observation 3, of the original paper)

6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations.
We exclude subjects who navigate through instructions in less than 10 seconds. We exclude subjects who, after a trial round, fail two or more quiz questions on the mechanics of the experiment in a first attempt, or who fail any question in a second attempt. We exclude subjects who do not complete all remaining tasks within 60min of passing the quiz.

7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size?
No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined.
Bilendi (a market research company) will recruit subjects online (Germany subject pool) until we report back 364 valid responses, or until 10 days have passed after start of data collection, whichever comes first. Subjects already on the task completion pipeline at the time we shut the experiment down will be allowed to continue until they finish within the time limit.

8) Anything else you would like to pre-register?
(e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?)
We implement termination probability uncertainty through different decks of cards that are removed after each of the first three periods. We rescale payoff functions for our desired incentive level but keep the points budget. We

We will make similar qualitative assessments based on univariate statistics as in the original paper.
We will calculate, for each subject, absolute cumulative lifetime deviation from optimal consumption paths (which are the same as in the original paper) conditional on uncertainty resolution paths. We will then use MANOVA to evaluate whether each uncertainty resolution path and treatment significantly affect cumulative deviation from optimal paths.

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