We study experimentally how the ability to communicate affects the frequency and effectiveness of flexible and inflexible contracts in a bilateral trade context where sellers can adjust trade quality after observing a post-contractual cost shock and a discretionary buyer transfer. In the absence...

Various experimental procedures aimed at measuring individual risk aversion involve a list of pairs of alternative prospects. We first study the widely used method by Holt and Laury (2002), for which we find that the removal of some items from the lists yields a systematic decrease in risk...

Recent research on the dynamics of moral behavior has documented two contrasting phenomena - moral consistency and moral balancing. Moral balancing refers to the phenomenon whereby behaving (un)ethically decreases the likelihood of doing so again at a later time. Moral consistency describes the...

Minority reserves are an affirmative action policy proposed by Hafalir et al. (2013) in the context of school choice. We study in the laboratory the effect of minority reserves on the outcomes of two prominent matching mechanisms, the Gale-Shapley and the Top Trading Cycles mechanisms. Our first...

Affirmative-action policies bias tournament rules in order to provide equal opportunities to a group of competitors who have a disadvantage they cannot be held responsible for. Critics argue that they distort incentives, resulting in lower individual performance, and that the selected pool of...

Opinion polls and other surveys are used to capture public sentiments on a variety of issues. If citizens are unwilling to reveal certain policy preferences to others, surveys may fail to characterize population preferences accurately. The innovation of this paper is to use unique data to...

We present a theory of context-dependent choice in which a consumer's attention is drawn to salient attributes of goods, such as quality or price. An attribute is salient for a good when it stands out among the good's attributes, relative to that attribute's average level in the choice set (or...

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is a test introduced by S. Frederick (2005) Cognitive reflection and decision making, J Econ Perspect 19(4): 25-42. The task is designed to measure the tendency to override an intuitive response that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads...

By identifying types whose low-order beliefs up to level ℓ_i about the state of nature coincide, we obtain quotient type spaces that are typically smaller than the original ones, preserve basic topological properties, and allow standard equilibrium analysis even under bounded reasoning. Our...

We develop a theory of news coverage in environments of information abundance. News consumers are time-constrained and browse through news items that are available across competing outlets, choosing which ones to read or skip. Media firms are aware of consumers' preferences and constraints, and...