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This paper reports an experiment using Stag Hunt games with different payoff ranges. Specifically, in one treatment for half of the games the payoff dominant and the risk dominant equilibrium coincide and for the other half of the games they conflict; in the second treatment they always conflict. The experiment provides evidence that the payoff range experienced by the participant influences the likelihood of efficient conventions emerging. In particular, experiencing games where payoff dominance and risk dominance coincide appears to make payoff dominance more attractive in games in which they conflict. In the experiment, we also observe conditional behavior emerging with experience. We develop a model of conditional expectations to explain these stylized facts that depends crucially on the assumption that after a brief learning period participants categorize their experience using the same relative bandwidth in both treatments even though the range of experience is twice as large in treatment 1 as it is in treatment 2. The assumption cannot be rejected by the data. The analysis provides a formal example in which increasing experienced diversity by changing the way similar experiences are categorized increases the likelihood of efficient conventions emerging in communities playing similar Stag Hunt games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on an experiment examining behavior and equilibrium selection in two similar, infinitely repeated games, Stag Hunt and Prisoner’s Dilemma under anonymous random matching. We are interested in the role that historical precedents may play for equilibrium selection between these two repeated games. We find that a precedent for efficient play in the repeated Stag Hunt game does not carry over to the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game despite the possibility that efficient play can be sustained as an equilibrium of the indefinitely repeated game. Similarly, a precedent for inefficient play in the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game does not extend to the repeated Stag Hunt game. We conclude that equilibrium selection between similar repeated games may have less to do with historical precedents and might instead depend more on strategic considerations associated with the different payoffs of these similar repeated games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the ability of subjects to transfer principles between related coordination games. Subjects play a class of order statistic coordination games closely related to the well-known minimum (or weak-link) and median games (Van Huyck et al. in Am Econ Rev 80:234-248, 1990, Q J Econ 106(3):885-910, 1991). When subjects play a random sequence of games with differing order statistics, play is less sensitive to the order statistic than when a fixed order statistic is used throughout. This is consistent with the prediction of a simple learning model with transfer. If subjects play a series of similar stag hunt games, play converges to the payoff dominant equilibrium when a convention emerges, replicating the main result of Rankin et al. (Games Econ Behav 32:315-337, 2000). When these subjects subsequently play a random sequence of order statistic games, play is shifted towards the payoff dominant equilibrium relative to subjects without previous experience. The data is consistent with subjects absorbing a general principle, play of the payoff dominant equilibrium, and applying it in a new related setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utility-based green electricity programs provide market opportunities for consumers to reduce the carbon footprint of their electricity use. These programs deploy three types of public-goods contribution mechanisms: voluntary contribution, green tariff, and all-or-nothing green tariff (Kotchen and Moore, 2007). We extend the theoretical understanding of the all-or-nothing green tariff mechanism by showing that an assumption of warm-glow preferences is needed to explain widespread participation in programs deploying this mechanism. We conduct the first experimental test to compare the revenue generating capacity of a pure public good (based on the voluntary contribution mechanism) and an impure public good (based on the green tariff mechanism). In experimental play, the voluntary contribution mechanism raises 50% more revenue than the green tariff mechanism. With the all-or-nothing green tariff, experimental play and regression estimates show that a warm-glow preference positively affects participation, as predicted by the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust and trustworthiness are important in social relationships. Levels of trust and trustworthiness are likely to depend on “social” utility; the magnitude of which is influenced by the social context governing individual relationships. Social networks are an example of such a social context. This paper investigates how social networks influence trust and trustworthiness by blending social network analysis with experimental economics methodology in two separate experiments. We show that trust and trustworthiness are higher for individuals who are more closely connected; in both cases, this relationship tapers off beyond second degree friendships. We also find that people tend to trust more central (popular) individuals. However, being more central (popular) has little influence on one's levels of trust and trustworthiness. We find these effects on trust to be only partially driven by the expectation of trustworthiness. We thus document evidence of a bias toward more closely connected and more popular individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I study experimental markets in which sellers interact with buyers who have biased beliefs about characteristics of the product sold. I examine whether such buyers can be exploited by sellers through the use of specifically designed pricing structures. Theoretically, I show that a necessary condition for exploitation is consumer naiveté about their belief bias, otherwise they infer their biased beliefs from the sellers' actions. My main experimental result establishes that whether exploitation arises depends on how difficult it is for buyers to make such inferences. When sellers can only make take-it-or-leave-it offers, no exploitation arises. If, however, contracts are agreed upon by bilateral bargaining, sellers earn higher profits compared to the case with unbiased beliefs. I present evidence that in the former case buyers anticipate and prevent exploitation. In the latter case, the richer interaction structure makes it harder for buyers to infer the sellers' incentives, leading to exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare the performance of the Boston Immediate Acceptance (IA) and Gale–Shapley Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanisms in a laboratory setting where we increase the number of participants per match. In our experiment, we first increase the number of students per match from 4 to 40; when we do so, participant truth-telling increases under DA but decreases under IA, leading to a decrease in efficiency under both mechanisms. Furthermore, we find that DA remains more stable than IA, regardless of scale. We then further increase the number of participants per match to 4,000 through the introduction of robots. When robots report their preferences truthfully, we find that scale has no effect on human best response behavior. By contrast, when we program the robots to draw their strategies from the distribution of empirical human strategies, we find that our increase in scale increases human ex-post best responses under both mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suppose that, in repeated games, players eventually engage in a pattern of action profiles, which we call a convention . Do some conventions seem more plausible than others? We answer axiomatically based on the principles of stability and efficient simplicity . The main solution says that conventions should be constant repetitions of a static Nash equilibrium, or such that players switch between two Pareto unranked profiles (across which they each change action). In some repeated games, this reduces the multiplicity of outcomes and even leads to uniqueness. The paper also reports experimental evidence that supports our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conduct laboratory experiments with human subjects to test the rationale of adopting a band versus point inflation targeting regime. Within the standard New Keynesian model, we evaluate the macroeconomic performances of both regimes according to the strength of shocks affecting the economy. We find that when the economy faces small uncorrelated shocks, the level of inflation as well as its volatility are significantly lower in a band targeting regime, while the output gap and interest rate levels and volatility are significantly lower in a point targeting regime with tolerance bands. However, when the economy faces large uncorrelated shocks, choosing the suitable inflation targeting regime is irrelevant because both regimes lead to comparable performances. These findings stand in contrast to those of the literature and question the relevance of clarifying a mid-point target within the bands, especially in emerging market economies more inclined to large and frequent shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conduct a model validation analysis of several behavioral models of voter turnout, using laboratory data. We call our method of model validation concealedparameter recovery, where estimation of a model is done under a veil of ignorance about some of the experimentally controlled parameters—in this case voting costs. We use quantal response equilibrium as the underlying, common structure for estimation, and estimate models of instrumental voting, altruistic voting, expressive voting, and ethical voting. All the models except the ethical voting model recover the concealed parameters reasonably well. We also report the results of a counterfactual analysis based on the recovered parameters, to compare the policy implications of the different models about the cost of a subsidy to increase turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of previous researches indicate that men prefer competition over cooperation, and it is sometimes suggested that women show the opposite behavioral preference. In the current study the effects of social context on gender differences in cooperation are investigated. For the purpose, we compared men and women behavior under two social conditions: in groups of strangers and in groups with long-term socialization—groups of friends. The differences were found in changes in the level of cooperation, taking into account the effects of mixing social and gender variables. Social interaction and communication made cooperation of group members strength and sustainable. However, men’s and women’s cooperative behavior in groups differed. Women were initially more inclined to cooperate in interaction with strangers. Men showed greater sensitivity to sociality effects. They tended to make cooperative decisions more often if there were friends in the group. Furthermore, men cooperated with previously unknown people after socialization with them significantly more than women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report boundary experiments testing the robustness of price convergence in double auction markets for non-durable goods in which there is extreme earnings inequality at the competitive equilibrium (CE). Following up on a conjecture by Smith (1976a), we test whether the well-known equilibrating power of the double auction institution is robust to the presence of complete information about traders’ values and costs and the presence of symmetric market power. We find that complete information is insufficient to impede convergence to CE prices; however, introducing market power consistently causes prices to deviate from the CE, whether or not subjects possess complete information. Our design highlights the value of boundary experiments in understanding how market institutions shape behavior, and our findings help delineate the limits of the double auction institution to generate competitive outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research community in experimental economics has been increasingly encouraged to replicate studies and increase the sample size. While these suggestions have strong advantages, they also potentially increase the financial costs associated with data collection and, as a result, hamper the growth of experimental economics and limit the questions that may be addressed using experimental methods. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of extra credit as a reward medium as it is financially less taxing and readily available to most researchers as an alternative. We focus on experimental asset markets because data is particularly costly to collect for these experiments, e.g., a market consisting of 8–12 traders interacting over 15 trading periods is an independent observation. Our treatment variable is the reward medium, either extra credit or cash. We compare bubble measures in the two treatments and we find that bubbles observed in the extra-credit sessions are not significantly different from bubbles observed in the cash sessions. These results suggest that extra credit is an effective reward medium in experimental asset markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The laboratory experiment described in this paper provides evidence on play in signaling games in the context of electoral competition. In this game, voters must infer the preferred policy of each candidate from the candidate’s choice of whether to announce (truthfully) his preferred policy or to take no position. Bayesian voters would put high probability on a candidate having an extreme policy preference after observing him take no position, but cursed voters would not fully appreciate the informational content of the decision to take no position. Stated beliefs reveal substantial uncertainty about other players’ strategies. Based on estimates of a structural model of cursed equilibrium allowing for heterogeneity in the degree of cursedness, 32% of choices between candidates are consistent with Bayesian updating, 32% imply no inferences about others’ types after observing their actions, and the remainder indicate partial updating. Though the experiment also includes treatments with subjects in both roles, these estimates are based on interactions with programmed candidates, implying that uncertainty about others’ rationality and strategic sophistication is not driving the result. We also find that the quantal response error structure in which errors depend on payoff differences cannot explain the pattern of errors that subjects make. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study prudence and temperance (next to risk aversion) in social settings. Previous experimental studies have shown that these higher-order risk preferences affect the choices of individuals deciding privately on lotteries that only affect their own payoff. Yet, many risky and financially relevant decisions are made in the social settings of households or organizations. We elicit higher-order risk preferences of individuals and systematically vary how an individual’s decision is made (alone or while communicating with a partner) and who is affected by the decision (only the individual or the partner as well). In doing so, we can isolate the effects of other-regarding concerns and communication on choices. Our results reveal that the majority of choices are risk averse, prudent, and temperate across social settings. We also observe that individuals are influenced significantly by the preferences of a partner when they are able to communicate and choices are payoff-relevant for both of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizing individual appropriators into output sharing groups has been found to effectively solve the tragedy of the commons problem. We experimentally investigate the robustness of this solution by introducing different channels of communication that naturally arise from group competitions. In the absence of communication, we confirm that output sharing can introduce sufficient free riding to offset over-harvesting and results in full efficiency. Allowing local communication within output-sharing groups substantially decreases this efficiency enhancement because it reduces free riding and boosts between-group competition. Yet the efficiency level is still significantly higher than that achieved when global communication is allowed among all appropriators in a conventional common pool resource without output sharing. The efficiency-reducing effect of local communication is mitigated when random partners instead of fixed partners are sharing output over time, and is nearly eliminated when random partners are formed with users who belong to different communication groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study in five diverse countries a laboratory social dilemma game in which incentives to steal from others lead to the socially inefficient diversion of resources from production unless the members of a given mini-society can abide by norms of non-theft or engage in low cost collective protection of their members’ wealth accumulations. We compare two treatments in which subjects have opportunities to exchange free-form messages to one without such opportunities, finding that most subjects allocate far less to theft and most groups achieve much greater efficiency in the presence of communication. Ease of identifying who has engaged in theft varies across the two communication treatments, but is of minor importance to the outcome. We find several coding-amenable elements of message content to be statistically significant predictors of group and individual outcomes. Contributing to the literature on culture, norms, and preferences, we find that the degree to which communication fosters cooperation varies among countries in a manner correlated with variation in survey based trust and with desistance from theft at the outset of our communication-free experiment treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the relative effectiveness of extrinsic monetary disincentives and intrinsic non-monetary disincentives to corruption, using a harassment bribery game. In doing so, we also test the Beckerian prediction that at the same level of expected payoff, a low probability of detection with high fine is a stronger deterrent to corruption than a high probability of detection with low fine. In Experiment 1, two treatments are designed to study the effect of a low probability of detection with high fine and a high probability of detection with low fine, on bribe taking behavior. In Experiment 2, subjects participate in the same baseline harassment bribery game either without or after having gone through a four-week ethics education program. Results show that: (a) a low probability of detection with high fine reduces both the amount and the likelihood of bribe demand, (b) a high probability of detection with low fine has no effect on bribe demand, (c) normative appeals of ethics education has a small effect on the likelihood but not on the amount of bribe demand, when measured immediately after the intervention, (d) the effect of ethics education vanishes when measured four weeks after the intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of effort provision in a controlled setting is a key research area in experimental economics. There are two major methodological paradigms in this literature: stated effort and real effort. In the stated-effort paradigm the researcher uses an “effort function” that maps choices to outcomes. In the real-effort paradigm, participants work on a task, and outcomes depend on their performance. The advantage of the stated-effort design is the control the researcher has over the cost of effort, which is particularly useful when testing theory. The advantage of the real-effort design is that it may be a better match to the field environment, particularly with respect to psychological aspects that affect behavior. An open question in the literature is the degree to which the results obtained by the two paradigms differ, and if they do, why. We present a review of methods used and discuss the results obtained from using these different approaches, and issues to consider when choosing and implementing a task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical and experimental study of affirmative action policies in school choice problems focusing on the minority reserve mechanism, or DA-Reserve, proposed by Hafalir et al. (2013) and the majority quota mechanism, or DA-Quota, proposed by Abdulkadiroglu and Sönmez (2003) , Kojima (2012) and Matsubae (2011) . An evaluation of the performance of these mechanisms showed that, (1) while truth-telling is a dominant strategy in both mechanisms, the rate of its occurrence was less than 60%; (2) the average payoff was significantly higher with DA-Reserve than with DA-Quota, as theoretically predicted; (3) surprisingly, the proportion of students exhibiting justified envy was higher with DA-Reserve than with DA-Quota; and (4) a systematic pattern of deviation from the dominant strategy (referred to as skipping-down ) was observed, and it was theoretically proven that this constituted Nash equilibrium with DA-Quota in some environments but not with DA-Reserve. More generally, the set of stable matchings was found to be larger with DA-Quota than with DA-Reserve, which explains the matching instability observed with the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a principal–agent framework in which principals can assign wage-irrelevant goals to agents. We find evidence that, when given the possibility to set wage-irrelevant goals, principals select incentive contracts for which pay is less responsive to agents' performance. Agents' performance is higher in the presence of goal setting despite weaker incentives. We develop a principal–agent model with reference-dependent utility that illustrates how labor contracts combining weak monetary incentives and wage-irrelevant goals can be optimal. The pervasive use of non-monetary incentives in the workplace may help account for previous empirical findings suggesting that firms rely on unexpectedly weak monetary incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Games with imperfect information often feature multiple equilibria, which depend on beliefs off the equilibrium path. Standard selection criteria such as passive, symmetric or wary beliefs rest on ad hoc restrictions on beliefs. We propose a new selection criterion that imposes no restrictions on beliefs: we select the action profile that is supported in equilibrium by the largest set of beliefs. We conduct an experiment to compare the predictive power of the existing and our novel selection criteria in an application on vertical multi-lateral contracting. We find that our criterion outperforms the other selection criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a laboratory experiment with 754 participants, we study the canonical one-shot moral hazard problem, comparing treatments with unobservable effort to benchmark treatments with verifiable effort. In our experiment, the players endogenously negotiate contracts. In line with contract theory, the contractibility of the outcome plays a crucial role when effort is a hidden action. If the outcome is contractible, most players overcome the hidden action problem by agreeing on incentive-compatible contracts. Communication is helpful, since it may reduce strategic uncertainty. If the outcome is non-contractible, in most cases low effort is chosen whenever effort is a hidden action. However, communication leads the players to agree on larger wages and substantially mitigates the underprovision of effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is ample evidence that the number of players can have an important impact on the cooperation and coordination behavior of people facing social dilemmas. With extremely few exceptions, the literature on cooperation assumes common knowledge about who is a player and how many players are involved in a certain situation. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is overly restrictive, and not even very common in real-world cooperation problems. We show theoretically and experimentally that uncertainty about the number of players in a Volunteer's Dilemma increases cooperation compared to a situation with a certain number of players. We identify additional behavioral mechanisms amplifying and impairing the effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We take school admission mechanisms to the lab to test whether the widely-used manipulable Immediate Acceptance mechanism disadvantages students of lower cognitive ability and whether this leads to ability segregation across schools. Results show this to be the case: lower ability participants receive lower payoffs and are over-represented at the worst school. Under the strategy-proof Deferred Acceptance mechanism, payoff differences are reduced, and ability distributions across schools harmonized. Hence, we find support for the argument that a strategy-proof mechanism “levels the playing field”. Finally, we document a trade-off between equity and efficiency in that average payoffs are larger under Immediate than under Deferred Acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In reciprocal interactions, both genuine kindness and self-interested material gain may motivate socially beneficial actions. The paper presents results from two experiments that distinguish the role of perceived motives in reciprocal decision making from the role of outcomes or perceived intentions. The results indicate that positive reciprocity triggered by the same beneficial action is lower when the first-mover is more likely to be motivated by strategic incentives. Therefore, stronger incentives for beneficial behavior may not increase total welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A popular solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is to create private property rights to access the commons. If resource users care about the welfare of others, they may be unwilling to respect property rights regimes that lead to unfair or inequitable outcomes. We explore in a series of laboratory experiments whether it is possible to undermine the efficacy of property rights solutions through the allocation process. We find that both the extent to which property rights are enforced and how they are allocated significantly affect extraction and compliance. Our findings suggest that one of the most popular allocation methods is suboptimal: we observe that occasional enforcement and the proportional allocation of property rights is dominated by no enforcement and the equal or inverse allocation of property rights. Our results support the view that allocation matters for property rights solutions to the commons problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a laboratory experiment to compare general equilibrium economies in which agents individually allocate their private goods among consumption, investment in production, and replenishing or refurbishing a depreciating public facility in a dynamic game with long-term investment opportunities. The public facility is financed either by voluntary anonymous contributions (VAC) or taxes. We find that rates of taxation chosen by majority vote remain at an intermediate level close to the finite-horizon optimum, and the experimental economies sustain public goods at levels between the finite- and infinite-horizon optima. This contrasts with a rapid decline of public goods under VAC. Both the payoff efficiency and production of private goods are higher when taxes are set endogenously instead of being fixed at the infinite-horizon optimum level externally. When taxes are adjusted to the respective finite-horizon optimum each period, production levels and efficiency remain as high as in the voting treatments at least in the latter half of the sessions. When subjects choose between VAC and taxation, 23 out of 24 majority votes favor taxation, demonstrating a clear preference for enforceable taxes to finance public goods in this setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental aid has grown significantly over the past decade with aid allocation mechanisms varying greatly and little guidance as to which should be preferred. To increase aid effectiveness, some have argued that potential recipients should compete for aid. We experimentally test this proposition against a baseline treatment where groups of heterogeneous agents receive aid by improving environmental quality. With the first mechanism, aid is allocated based on the improvement of environmental quality by each group with the potential of multiple groups receiving aid. In the second mechanism, aid is competitively allocated only to the single group that has initiated the greatest improvement of environmental quality. Surprisingly, the average level of environmental progress is lower in a competitive setting than in the setting with the potential for multiple recipients. Underscoring this result is our finding that environmental progress is stable in the baseline but begins high and falls quickly with repetitions in the competition. Although the initial level of progress is higher on average in the competitive setting, this mechanism generates the highest variance which could be catastrophic to sensitive ecosystems. These findings have direct implications on which mechanism the granting agency should use dependent upon their specific objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, each party sets its own mitigation target by submitting a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) every five years. An important question is whether including conditional components in NDCs might enhance the agreement's effectiveness. We report the results of a closely controlled laboratory experiment--based on a mixed sequential-simultaneous public good game with one leader and three followers--that helps answer this question. The experiment investigates how two factors influence the effectiveness of leadership based on intrinsically conditional commitments. Measuring effectiveness in terms of followers' and total contributions, we find that it may help if the conditional promise is credible and if its implementation influences followers' welfare substantially. Importantly, however, for both factors we find a significant effect only if the leader does not reap disproportionate gains from the group's efforts. These findings have important implications concerning the future success of the Paris Agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the optimal shape of organizations to reduce embezzlement. In a stylized synthesis of a common pool resource and ultimatum game, agents are activated sequentially within an organizational architecture wherein they can take a share of the available resources or choose to “blow the whistle”, an action that sets all payoffs to zero. The resources not taken will grow and benefit all agents. Six basic organizational architectures are tested, including horizontal, vertical, pyramid shaped, and inverted pyramid-shaped structures. Our results suggest that horizontal and pyramid structures are more effective at reducing embezzlement. Rates of embezzlement and whistleblowing increase with the number of levels in the structure. Holding the number of levels constant, embezzlement rates are lower in pyramid shaped structures than inverted-pyramid shaped structures, while whistleblowing rates are unchanged. Our results are relevant to public agencies, foreign aid, charitable non-profits, and other contexts where capital leakage is a common problem and the costs of whistleblowing are borne broadly by the members of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study experimentally whether an overlapping membership structure affects the incentives of short-lived organizational members. We compare organizations in which one member is replaced per time period to organizations in which both members are replaced at the same time. We find at best weak support for the hypothesis that an overlapping membership structure is conducive to cooperation in ongoing organizations. Incoming members are sensitive to the organizational history when membership is overlapping, as they should according to the cooperative equilibrium, but this is not enough to substantially increase cooperation levels in the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the behavioral learning characteristics of smallholder female farmers in Uganda by quantifying the amount of information learned under different incentive schemes. The paper shows how competitive versus team incentives compare in motivating Ugandan farmers to learn and share information relevant to adopting a new agricultural technology. We find that tournament-based incentives provide greater outcomes in terms of total information learned than threshold-based team incentives. Furthermore the order of the incentive – whether the tournament precedes or follows the team incentive scheme – does not affect the volume of information learned. New information introduced between rounds was learned by more individuals under team incentives than under tournament incentives. The study provides direct practical policy recommendations for improving learning in the context of agriculture in Uganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is frequently observed that despite individual incentives to free ride, humans decide to cooperate with each other to increase social payoffs. In the current research, we address the effects of individual differences in justice sensitivity on cooperation. Using incentivized repeated public good games, we find that individual differences in justice sensitivity—the ease of perceiving, remembering, and reacting to injustice from the perspectives of an observer, beneficiary, or perpetrator, but not victim—substantially predicts cooperation in the absence of a punishment option. In contrast, when costly punishment is allowed for, cooperation becomes strategic as it also aims at avoiding subsequent punishment. If such a sanctioning mechanism is in place, justice sensitivity no longer predicts cooperation. The results regarding the degree of cooperation as reaction to initial non-cooperation of one’s counterparts highlight the role of justice-concerning personality traits for the sufficient provision of public goods, as sanctioning institutions are not always possible, effective, or suitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a college admissions problem in which students' choice set is limited by colleges' strategic actions, such as early decision programs in the US or simultaneous entrance examinations in Asia, in order to prevent multiple applications. We call this action the conflicting strategy and conduct laboratory experiments to explore the problem. We argue that colleges' prestige and students' uncertainty about admissions outcomes are two important factors. Our model and experimental results demonstrate that when uncertainty is high and the prestige difference is low, a lower-ranked college can obtain more desired students through the conflicting strategy. Moreover, through this strategy, students with stronger preferences for a higher-ranked college have a higher chance to be accepted, which could result in an increase of students' aggregate welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rewards are identified as a mechanism to sustain cooperation in standard Public Good games, but have been found less effective in Common Pool Resource games. Both paradigms are important for environmental and resource economics as they capture the essence of real-world environmental and resource problems – the provision of pure public goods, and overextraction of common pool resources. This paper aims to understand why rewards are effective in one paradigm and not in the other. We hypothesize that this is because of an important difference between the two; the marginal per capita return is uncertain in the Common Pool Resource game because subjects can undo cooperative actions of others. This is just one of many differences between the two paradigms and hence we test our Hypothesis by introducing the option to reward in the Claim game, a game identical to the standard public good game except that it allows for both giving and taking. This feature causes the marginal per capita return to be uncertain. We find that while rewards are effective in sustaining cooperation in the Public Good game, they are much less effective in the Claim game. We identify the underlying mechanism causing this differential impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally test different rule-based contribution mechanisms in a repeated 4-player public goods game with endowment heterogeneity and compare them to a VCM, distinguishing between a random and an effort-based allocation of endowments. We find that endowment heterogeneities limit the efficiency gains from these rule-based contribution schemes under random allocation. Under effort-based allocations, substantial efficiency gains relative to a VCM occur. These are largely driven by significant reductions of contributions in VCM, while the rule-based mechanisms generate stable efficiency levels, even though falling short in realizing the maximal efficiency gains. Our results indicate that the procedure of endowment allocation impacts the perception of what constitutes a fair burden sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monetary incentives are a procedural pillar in experimental economics. By applying four distinct monetary incentive schemes in three experimental finance applications, we investigate the impact of an incentive scheme’s salience on results and elicit subjects’ perception of the experienced scheme. We find (1) no differences in results between salient schemes but a significant impact if the incentive scheme is non-salient. (2) The number of previous participations has a significant impact on the perception of the incentive scheme by subjects: it strongly correlates with subjects’ motives for participation, positively contributes to subjects’ understanding of the incentive scheme, but has no influence on subjects’ motivation within the experiment. (3) Subjects favor more salient over less- or non-salient schemes in the gain domain and negatively evaluate high salience in the loss domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the role of intentions in two-player two-stage games. For this purpose we systematically vary the set of opportunity sets the first mover can choose from and study how the second mover reacts not only to opportunities of gains but also of losses created by the choice of the first mover. We find that the possibility of gains for the second mover (generosity) and the risk of losses for the first mover (vulnerability) are important drivers for second mover behavior. On the other hand, efficiency concerns and an aversion against violating trust seem to be far less important motivations. We also find that second movers compare the actual choice of the first mover and the alternative choices that would have been available to him to allocations that involve equal material payoffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We design a laboratory experiment in which an interested third party endowed with private information sends a public message to two conflicting players, who then make their choices. We find that third-party communication is not strategic. Nevertheless, a hawkish message by a third party makes hawkish behavior more likely while a dovish message makes it less likely. Moreover, how subjects respond to the message is largely unaffected by the third party’s incentives. We argue that our results are consistent with a focal point interpretation in the spirit of Schelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how the ratio between the length of the second and fourth digit (2D:4D) correlates with choices in social and risk preferences elicitation tasks by building a large dataset from five experimental projects with more than 800 subjects. Our results confirm the recent literature that downplays the link between 2D:4D and many domains of economic interest, such as social and risk preferences. As for the former, we find that social preferences are significantly lower when 2D:4D is above the median value only for subjects with low cognitive ability. As for the latter, we find that a high 2D:4D is not correlated with the frequency of subject's risky choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For both two person teams and individuals unrestricted communication between opponents in a finitely repeated prisoner dilemma game results in stage-one cooperation rates of between 95–100%. Content analysis of between opponent communication focuses on the increased earnings cooperation can achieve, with minimal discussion of punishment for failing to cooperate. Restoring cooperation after an early stage-game defection typically requires compensating the aggrieved agent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bubbles are omnipresent in lab experiments with asset markets. Most of these experiments are conducted in environments with only human traders. Since today's markets are substantially determined by algorithmic trading, we use a laboratory experiment to measure how human trading depends on the expected presence of algorithmic traders. We find that bubbles are clearly smaller when human traders expect algorithmic traders to be present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Involving multiple-purchasers in a PES scheme has the potential to deliver numerous benefits including cost-sharing, expanded financing and broadened scope. That few such schemes exist is evidence of a classic market failure resulting from incentives to free-ride on the payments of other purchasers. In the context of an experimental investigation, this paper explores the role of negotiation and binding pre-commitments to payments in solving that collective action problem. Our novel experimental setup involves two purchasers seeking a level of payment acceptable to a single provider while also agreeing their own individual contributions to that payment. Contrasting treatments are used to explore complexities of the conditions under which negotiations might take place including asymmetries between the purchasers, treatments with incomplete information and treatments with uncertainty over the levels of benefit. We find that those complexities change the ease with which a negotiated agreement is achieved as well as the relative size of the payoffs enjoyed by the different parties to the negotiations Our findings are generally positive, showing that under many circumstances parties to a multiple-purchaser PES can successfully negotiate a mutually agreeable schedule of payments and contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We design a laboratory experiment to investigate matching in a decentralized market of deferred acceptance. Agents are undifferentiated and may have multiple partners; their payoff depends on who they match with. The experiment is designed in such a way that a stable configuration exists, but cannot be eyeballed by the participants due to the computational complexity of the game. In spite of this, subjects are remarkably good at reaching a stable match, even when the payoffs of others are not publicly observed. More information does, however, speed up convergence thanks to self-censoring. We trace irrational matching choices mostly to two sources: the tendency of over-think in a setting where strategic thinking is not necessary, and the reluctance to accept matching offers from those who have been disloyal in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We design a continuous-time experiment to study how different short-term credit maturities interact with the state of the economy. We find that, when the economy is in a boom, long maturities stabilize the credit market. Yet, when in a downturn, such maturities increase the likelihood of credit freezes. This result has important regulatory implications, as it suggests that a policy aimed at reducing maturity mismatch in short-term credit markets might backfire during a recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a legislative bargaining game in which failure to agree in a given round may result in a breakdown of negotiations. In that case, each player receives an exogenous ‘disagreement value’. We characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibria under all q-majority rules. Under unanimity rule, equilibrium payoffs are strictly increasing in disagreement values. Under all less-than-unanimity rules, expected payoffs are either decreasing or first increasing and then decreasing in disagreement values. We conduct experiments involving three players using majority and unanimity rule, finding qualitative support for several, but not all, of our main predictions. Having a high disagreement value is indeed an advantage under unanimity rule. Under majority rule, the player with the highest disagreement value is more likely to be excluded, but this does not consistently result in a lower average payoff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing inequality is commonly associated with social unrest and conflict between social classes. This paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment to study the implications of greater inequality on the tendency to burn others' income. The experiment considers an environment where higher earnings in a real-effort task are typically associated with higher effort and varies how fair and transparent this relationship is. The findings indicate that greater inequality does not lead to more money burning itself. Rather, it depends on whether the increase in inequality can be unequivocally attributed to exerted effort, i.e., the fairness of the income-generating process. Only if greater inequality can be the result of morally questionable activities, subjects engage in substantially more money burning. While most income burning aims at reducing inequality, the fairness of inequality only plays a role in the extent of money burning but not so much for the qualitative burning patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “ratchet effect” is a phenomenon where workers strategically restrict their output because they anticipate high levels of productivity will be met with increased expectations in the future. Using a real-effort work task and a piece-rate incentive scheme, we investigate the presence of the ratchet effect using two different methods for evaluating worker productivity: (i) when productivity is evaluated individually, and (ii) when productivity is evaluated collectively among a group of workers. We find strong evidence that workers restrict output when productivity is evaluated individually. However, we find little evidence of output restriction when productivity is evaluated at the group-level, which we attribute to the coordination problem and the free-riding incentive that emerge within the group. Although, output restriction re-emerges if workers are able to communicate. We also examine an important dynamic implication of the ratchet effect, and our results indicate that output restriction reduces future productivity through reduced learning-by-doing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an experiment investigating whether decision makers discriminate between members of their own group and members of another group. I focus on two aspects of this question: First, I compare behavior in individual and in joint decisions; Second, I test whether the identity of the co-decision maker matters in joint decisions. Substantial own group favoritism occurs in joint decisions in spite of there being no such favoritism in individual decisions. Decision makers strongly favor own group candidates when deciding with someone from their own group, but not when deciding with someone from the other group. The study suggests that higher-order beliefs about co-decision maker behavior may be a factor behind discrimination in collective settings and that diversity in committees might be helpful in counteracting own group favoritism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]