Existing experimental research on behavior in weakest-link games shows overwhelmingly the inability of people to coordinate on the efficient equilibrium, especially in larger groups. We hypothesize that people will be able to coordinate on efficient outcomes, provided they have sufficient...

Are humans intuitively cooperative, or do we need to deliberate in order to be generous to others? The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) proposes that fast instinctive decision making promotes cooperation in social dilemmas. In this paper, we conduct a novel time-pressure experiment to shed...

A burgeoning literature in economics has started examining the role of social norms in explaining economic behavior. Surprisingly, the vast majority of this literature has studied social norms in asocial decision settings, where individuals are observed to act in isolation from each other. In...

We provide new experimental evidence which suggests an asymmetric discouragement effect in lottery contests with heterogeneous abilities. Compared to a symmetric contest, subjects invest less effort when facing a stronger opponent, but they invest the same when facing a weaker opponent. Our...

Introducing a threshold in the sense of a minimal project size transforms a public goods game with an inefficient equilibrium into a coordination game with a set of Pareto-superior equilibria. Thresholds may therefore improve efficiency in the voluntary provision of public goods. In our one-shot...

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 investigate overlapping contests in multi-divisional organizations in which an individual's effort simultaneously determines the outcome of several contests on different hierarchical levels. We show that individuals in smaller units are advantaged in the grand (organization-wide) contest for...

We study equilibrium reporting behavior in Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013) type cheating games when agents have a fixed cost of lying and image concerns not to be perceived as a liar. We show that equilibria naturally arise in which agents with low costs of lying randomize among a set of...

This note uncovers new properties of the von Neumann-Morgenstern solution in weak tournaments and majoritarian games. We propose a new procedure for the construction of choice sets from weak tournaments, based on dynamic stability criteria. The idea is to analyze dynamic versions of the...

We experimentally investigate spillover effects of affirmative action policies on team performance and the willingness to work in teams. We find that such policies in form of gender quotas do not harm performance and cooperation within teams, and do not discourage selection into teams.