Many committees—juries, political task forces, etc.—spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting...

We report an experiment comparing sequential and simultaneous contributions to a public good in a quasi-linear two-person setting (Varian, Journal of Public Economics, 1994). Our findings support the theoretical argument that sequential contributions result in lower overall provision than...

This article analyzes how the anticipation of peer-punishment affects cooperativeness in the provision of public goods under social identity. For this purpose we conduct one-shot public good games with induced social identity and implement in-group, out-group and random matching protocols. Our...

Reputational herding has been considered as a driving force behind economic and financial forecasts clustered around consensus values. Strategic coordination can consequently explain poor performances of prediction markets as resulting from the distinct incentives that forecasters face. While...

Behavioral biases in forecasting, particularly the lack of adjustment from current values and the overall clustering of forecasts, are increasingly explained as resulting from the anchoring heuristic. Nonetheless, the classical anchoring experiments presented in support of this interpretation...

Centralized sanctioning institutions are of utmost importance for overcoming free-riding tendencies and enforcing outcomes that maximize group welfare in social dilemma situations. However, little is known about how such institutions come into existence. In this paper we investigate, both...

We analyze equilibria of two-player contests where players have intention-based preferences. We find that players invest more effort compared to the case with selfish preferences and are even willing to exert effort when the monetary value of the prize converges to zero. As a consequence,...

We examine speculative attacks in a controlled laboratory environment featuring continuous time, size asymmetries, and varying amounts of public information. Attacks succeeded in 233 of 344 possible cases. When speculators have symmetric size and access to information: (a) weaker fundamentals...

In a public-good experiment with heterogeneous endowments, we investigate if and how the contribution level as well as the previously observed "fair-share" rule of equal contributions relative to oneś endowment (Hofmeyr et al., 2007; Keser et al., 2014) may be influenced by minimum-contribution...

We experimentally study settings where an individual may have an incentive to adopt negative beliefs about another’s intentions in order to justify egoistic behavior. Our first study uses a game in which a player can take money from an opponent in order to prevent the opponent from...