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Instructions

Welcome to our experiment! In this experiment we want you to answer a couple of survey questions, for which you are being paid for. The survey questions are not meant to test you and there are no right or wrong answers. The experiment is being conducted by a research group at the University of St. Gallen. Your participation is completely voluntary. Please read the following explanations carefully.

For answering the short survey, we compensate you with a fixed participation fee of 3 CHF plus an additional payoff that is not the same for every participant. This additional payoff is determined randomly by the second decimal place of a stock market index at the point in time we ask you to look it up. You can see how much additional payoff you receive conditional on the value of the second decimal from the chart below.

Current value of second decimal digit of stock index:
0
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Resulting payoff
0.00
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
8.00
9.00

To determine the additional payoff, you go to the Google Widget that shows the value of either the Swiss Market Index (SMI) OR the DAX Performance Index (DAX) as presented below. You decide, which of the two indices you would like to use for this, and we will not know about your choice of the index. We will ask you to report the current value of the second decimal place of the value of the selected index. This number changes frequently and we need you to report only the value in the particular moment when you first look at it once we have asked you to do so.

For example, if the SMI value is 10’488.97, as in the example above, the correctly reported value is 7 and thus provides an additional payoff of 7 CHF. In that case you receive a total compensation for participating in our experiment of 10 CHF (i.e., 7 CHF + 3 CHF). Remember that only the second decimal place of the selected index value should be reported.

In total you can earn between 3 CHF and 12 CHF in this short experiment that takes about 15 minutes to finish. The structure of the experiment is as follows:

  1. Short personal survey
  2. SMI or DAX lookup to determine additional payment
  3. One additional personal questionnaire

The information that we obtain will be used only for our research. It will be analyzed anonymously and will not be disclosed to third parties. The responses that you give cannot be connected to your identity by design of the experiment.

If at any time or for any reason you decide not to participate anymore, you are free to stop the experiment whether you have started or not.

Please make sure that you are in a quiet place without any distractions. Also, please turn off your mobile phone.

The payment for your participation will be sent to your bank account and we will ask you for your bank information on a separate website. Note that the money can only be transferred to a Swiss bank account or a PayPal account. Please have your IBAN or your PayPal e-mail address ready. Please note also that it is not possible for us to link your bank account information to the responses you give in this experiment as they are stored in a different database.