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Information Sheet


Principal Investigator: Dr. Alec Smith IRB# and Title of Study: #23-382 Decision-making in Multi-attribute Choices Experiment

You are invited to participate in a research study. This form includes information about the study and contact information if you have any questions. The purpose of this research is to study decision making in a complex environment.


What Should I know?

If you decide to participate in this study, you will complete a decision-making experiment and a survey. You will be asked to find the best alternative out of 5 options, each with multiple attributes in the experiment. You will have to click and search through attributes to reveal their values. This study will take place online using Amazon Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome).

You will first read a set of instructions to learn how the decision page will look like. There will be one short quiz to help you understand the set up. Correct answers will be provided to you after the quiz. Next, you will participate in the experiment, followed by a brief survey. Lastly, you will collect the earnings from the experiment.

The study should take about 20-30 minutes of your time. At the end, you will receive a code that you have to enter on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website to receive your payment. The payment consists of a fixed payment ($2.00) plus a variable payment. The variable payment will depend on your choices and a random component. Participants will receive a variable payment of about $3.00 on average. Please note that your variable payment might be higher or lower than this. Please do not refresh the page at any time or click “back” or “forward” in your browser. This may cause a crash and you will have to start again. A “next” button will appear as soon as all relevant texts are shown on screen. We do not anticipate any risks from completing this study.

You can choose whether to be in this study or not. You may withdraw at any time without consequences of any kind. You may also refuse to answer any questions you don’t want to answer and remain in the study.


Confidentiality

Every effort will be made to ensure your confidentiality, but we cannot guarantee 100% confidentiality. The information that you provide and the decisions that you make during the experiment will be recorded; however, only your Subject code/ID generated by Amazon Mechanical Turk website will identify you.

Your responses are anonymous, so no one can associate your answers back to you. Please do not include your name or other identifying information in your responses that can identify you.

The experiment involves no interaction amongst the participants, no other participant can see the decisions made by you.

It is possible that the Institutional Review Board (IRB) may view this study’s collected data for auditing purposes. The IRB is responsible for the oversight of the protection of human subjects involved in research.


Who can I talk to?

If you have any questions or concerns about the research, please feel free to contact Alec Smith Ph.D. at (540) 231-7353 (alecsmith@vt.edu). You are not waiving any legal claims, rights, or remedies because of your participation in this research study. If you have questions regarding your rights as a research participant, contact the Virginia Tech HRPP Office at 540-231-3732 (irb@vt.edu).


Please print out a copy of this information sheet for your records.

If you would like to participate in this study, click "Yes" to begin or "No" to exit.
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