Major bubble episodes are rare events. In this paper, we examine what factors might cause some asset price bubbles to become very large. We recreate, in a laboratory setting, some of the specific institutional features investors in the South Sea Company faced in 1720. Several factors have been...

We introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response. Unlike standard models of strategic thinking, in this framework the player's "depth of reasoning" is endogenously determined, and it can be disentangled from his beliefs over his opponent's cognitive bound. In our approach,...

Through an experiment, we investigate how the level of rationality relates to concerns for equality and efficiency. Subjects perform dictator games and a guessing game. More rational subjects are not more frequently of the selfregarding type. When performing a comparison within the same degree...

While markets are often decentralized, in many other cases agents in one role can only negotiate with a proper subset of the agents in the complementary role. There may be proximity issues or restricted communication flows. For example, information may be transmitted only through word-of-mouth,...

We perform an experimental test of Maskin's canonical mechanism for Nash implementation, using 3 subjects in non-repeated groups, as well as 3 outcomes, states of nature, and integer choices. We find that this mechanism succesfully implements the desired outcome a large majority of the time and...

In an experiment we study market outcomes under alternative incentive structures for third-party enforcers. Our transactions resemble an anonymous credit market where lenders can give loans and borrowers can repay them. When borrowers default, judges are free to enforce repayment but are...

It has long been standard in agency theory to search for incentive-compatible mechanisms on the assumption that people care only about their own material wealth. However, this assumption is clearly refuted by numerous experiments, and we feel that it may be useful to consider nonpecuniary...

We perform an experiment on a pure coordination game with uncertainty about the payoffs. Our game is closely related to models that have been used in many macroeconomic and financial applications to solve problems of equilibrium indeterminacy. In our experiment each subject receives a noisy...

We run an experiment in which two subjects play a two-round minimum effort game in the presence of a third player (principal) who is the only one informed about past effort choices and benefits from a higher minimum effort of the others. Sanctions introduced in the second round by the...