Hi everyone,
I was wondering how oTree sends payment data to participants on Prolific (or MTurk). I need to know this for administrative/legal purposes.

As far as I know, when creating a survey on Prolific you can specify the link to the oTree session and set that URL parameters will store the Participant ID; oTree will save Prolific IDs in its database and assign payments. Then, what happens exactly? 

How does oTree send these data to Prolific, specifically? And does it send only the Prolific ID and the payment to be assigned to it?

Thanks.

LC

Hi there

oTree does not send data to Prolific directly. However, you can use oTree HR (https://hr.otreehub.com/) to connect your Survey on Prolific with oTree.

With that feature, you can give the participants a link at the study's end, automatically redirecting them to Prolific and completing the assignments.
Furthermore, you can create a very convenient list of participants who receive a bonus and copy & paste that info into Prolific.

I've used it for a few experiments, and it worked seamlessly.

Hope that helps!

Best,
Daniel

Hi Daniel,
thanks for the quick reply and the info!

oTree HR seems very useful for managing payments on Prolific and I'm definitely using it. My doubt was on the exact workings of oTree HR from a data-transfer viewpoint: if I understand correctly, you as an experimenter post sessions on Prolific through oTree HR, store Prolific IDs in URL parameters in the oTree URL, and then you pay participants based on their IDs.

I would like to know if "this is it" in terms of data transfer: oTree (or the experimenter, through oTree HR) will simply "tell" Prolific to pay participants with that ID with the associated amount, and stop, right? No other data is transferred from oTree or oTree HR to Prolific? I believe this is the case, but I cannot find any documentation explaining how it works in practice, and having an official (or commonsensical) "reference" would help me in smoothing the process of obtaining some authorizations to use this system.

In other words, I would like some kind of official or reasonable proof that just the payment data associated to anonymous ID are transferred on Prolific and nothing else.

Thanks!

Luca

As far as I know, the only data transfer from oTree to Prolific is with the completion URL, which you can provide to the participants at the end of the experiment so that their assignment gets completed by clicking that link.

Besides that, no data is automatically transferred to Prolific (Since they are two completely different databases).

After the data collection of the session is complete, you can copy & paste the payments list into Prolific, which pays the variable bonuses (if you will pay any).

Although I haven't seen any official proof of that, I hope my explanations are reasonable enough for you :)

Best,
Daniel