"Big" Experiments on Population Scale Behavior Change

Aral discusses the newly emerging capability to rapidly deploy and iterate micro-level, randomized, and large-scale experiments in complex social and economic settings at the population scale. Large scale experiments, conducted on millions or hundreds of millions of people, allow researchers to unpack the heterogeneity of effects across different subpopulations in society. He demonstrates how they can be employed to examine the behavioral mechanisms and apply to climate change adaptation.