This paper reports the results of experiments designed to test the theory of the optimal composition of prizes in contests. We find that while in the aggregate the behavior of our subjects is consistent with that predicted by the theory, such aggregate results mask an unexpected compositional...

Social learning is the process of individuals learning by observing the actions of others. In the real world, however, although people learn by observing the actions of others, they also learn from advice. This paper introduces advice giving into a standard social-learning problem. The...

In this paper, we present the results of two experiments on social sampling. In both experiments, people are asked to make a risky decision in a situation where an idiosyncratic luck term a?ects their performance. Before they make their decision, people have the opportunity to sample others who...

A reading of the literature on cognitive hierarchies leaves the impression that a subject's type is predetermined before he comes into the lab so that the distribution of types is exogenous and immutable across games. In this paper we view the choice of a person's cognitive level as endogenous...

Political actors in settings of bargaining and conflict often find themselves uncertain about the motives of their counterparts. This paper explores the psychology of motive assessment using a novel experimental design involving imperfect-information versions of the ultimatum and dictator...

A theory of deliberation must provide a plausible account both of individuals? choices to speak or to listen and of how they reinterpret their own views in the aftermath of deliberation. We describe a game-theoretic laboratory experiment in which subjects with diverse interests and information...

This paper reports the first laboratory study of the swing voter's curse and provides insights on the larger theoretical and empirical literature on "pivotal voter" models. Our experiment controls for different information levels of voters, as well as teh size of the electorate, the distribution...

Existing behavioral studies of inter-temporal choice suggest that both human and animal choosers are impulsive. One possible explanation for this is that they discount future gains in a hyperbolic or quasi-hyperbolic fasion (Laibson, 1997; Frederick, Loewenstein and O'Donoghue, 2002). This...