Humans often lie strategically. We study this problem in an ultimatum game with an informed proposer and an uninformed responder, where the former can send an unverifiable statement about his endowment. A simple message game with heterogenous players with respect to lying costs shows that in...

We examine subjects’ behavior in sender–receiver games where there are gains from trade and alignment of interests in one of the two states. We elicit subjects’ beliefs, risk and other-regarding preferences. Our design also allows us to examine the behavior of subjects in both roles, to...

The market for retail financial products (e.g., investment funds or insurances) is marred by information asymmetries. Clients are not well informed about the quality of these products. They have to rely on the recommendations of advisors. Incentives of advisors and clients may not be aligned,...

We set up an experiment to study whether disclosure of the advisor's interests can foster truthfulness and trust. We measure how advisors expect decisionmakers to react to their advice in order to distinguish between strategic and moral reactions to disclosure by advisors. Results indicate that...

In an experiment with professionals from the financial services sector, we investigate the impact of a team incentive scheme on the recommendation quality of investment products when advisors benefit from advising lower quality products. Experimental results reveal that, when group affiliation...

Principal-agent models in which the agent has access to private information before a contract is signed are a cornerstone of contract theory. We have conducted an experiment with 720 participants to explore whether the theoretical insights are reflected by the behavior of subjects in the...

We propose and initiate the study of privacy elasticity--the responsiveness of economic variables to small changes in the level of privacy given to participants in an economic system. Individuals rarely experience either full privacy or a complete lack of privacy; we propose to use differential...

In several common-value environments (e.g., auctions or elections), players should make informational inferences from opponents' strategies under certain hypothetical events (e.g., winning the auction or being pivotal). We design a voting experiment that identifies whether subjects make these...