'Replication of Study 2A of Park, Lalwani, & Silvera (2019) – Attrition' (AsPredicted #41472)
Author(s) Joseph Simmons (University of Pennsylvania) - jsimmo@upenn.edu Leif Nelson (University of California, Berkeley) - leif_nelson@haas.berkeley.edu
Pre-registered on 05/21/2020 05:28 AM (PT)
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 is a replication of Study 2A in Park, Lalwani, and Silvera (2019), “The Impact of Resource Scarcity on Price-Quality Judgments,” published in the Journal of Consumer Research. This study examines the hypothesis that “scarcity decreases consumers’ tendency to use price to judge product quality.” It also examines whether scarcity influences one’s desire to seek abundance and one’s general categorization tendency. In a previous replication, we encountered a problem of differential attrition across conditions. In this study, we are testing whether the results will be different when we put measures in place to try to reduce differential attrition.
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. There are three dependent variables in the main study of this experiment.
1. Price-quality correlation. Participants will judge the quality of 10 computer monitors on the basis of their price. The quality ratings will be made on a scale from 1-100. For each participant, we will compute the correlation between the price of those 10 monitors and the quality rating that they provide.
2. Desire for abundance. Participants will indicate they extent to which each of the following three statements characterize them, on a scale from 1 = Not at all to 7 = Definitely: “I desire to have a lot of things.”; “I desire to own a lot of things.”; “Having a lot of things makes me happy.” Responses to these three statements will be averaged.
3. Categorization tendency. Participants will view four shapes and be asked to indicate their agreement with four statements on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree. Responses to all four questions will be reverse-scored and then averaged.
Roughly 1/6 of our participants will not complete these measures and will instead complete a manipulation check. This check will consist of five items designed to assess whether people feel a sense of scarcity. Items will be answered on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree. All five responses will be averaged.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? We will manipulate whether participants will write about three episodes in which resources were scarce (scarcity condition) or three episodes/events that they did in the past week (control condition).
We will also manipulate whether participants will be asked to do the same survey as in the previous replication (late-attrition condition), or whether, prior to the scarcity manipulation, we (1) warn them that they are going to have to do a letter string task and a writing task and force them to decide whether to continue the survey, and (2) have them count the number of vowels in 5 long letter strings (early-attrition condition). The hope is that participants who are uninterested in putting in the effort to do the writing task will drop out at this point, instead of dropping our differentially once the writing task is introduced.
We will also manipulate whether participants will do the main study (including the three critical dependent variables) or whether they instead simply complete a manipulation check. Approximately 1/6 of the sample will be assigned to the manipulation check condition.
Finally, among those who complete the main study, we will randomly assign participants to see four different orders of computer monitor prices during the quality rating task. This is for robustness and will not be analyzed.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. For those who complete the main study, we will regress each dependent variable on (1) attrition condition (contrast-coded), scarcity condition (contrast-coded), and (3) the interaction between (1) and (2). We will also conduct separate t-tests within each attrition condition.
For those who complete the manipulation check, we will regress each the manipulation check measure on (1) attrition condition (contrast-coded), scarcity condition (contrast-coded), and (3) the interaction between (1) and (2). We will also conduct separate t-tests within each attrition condition.
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. We will exclude participants in the main study who (1) fail to rate all 10 monitors, (2) give the same quality rating to all 10 monitors, or (3) take less than 20 seconds to complete the writing task manipulation at the outset of the study. If we obtain duplicate responses from the same MTurk ID or IP address in the study, we will include the first response only. Finally, within the early-attrition condition, we will exclude participants who fail to provide the correct vowel counts for all five letter strings.
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. We will collect data from 2,800 U.S. MTurk participants.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) The original study also reports the results of a mediation analysis. We will compute the correlations among the critical dependent variables in the main study, but we will not perform the mediation analysis.
