We experimentally investigate in the laboratory two prominent mechanisms that are employed in school choice programs to assign students to public schools. We study how individual behavior is influenced by preference intensities and risk aversion. Our main results show that (a) the GaleShapley...

This paper investigates experimentally how organisational decision processes affect the moral motivations of actors inside a firm that must forego profits to reduce harming a third party. In a "vertical" treatment, one insider unilaterally sets the harm-reduction strategy; the other can only...

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 self-regarding type. When performing a comparison within the same degree...

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...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how, after a history of decay, cooperation in a repeated voluntary contribution game can be revived in an enduring way. Simply starting the repeated game over - a simple fresh start - leads to an initial increase of cooperation, but to a subsequent new...

We introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response. Unlike standard level-k models, 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, individuals...

The existence of punishment opportunities has been shown to cause efficiency in public goods experiments to increase considerably. In this paper we ask whether punishment also has a downside in terms of process dissatisfaction. We conduct an experiment to study the conjecture that an environment...

We study the effectiveness of leaders for inducing coordinated organizational change to a more efficient equilibrium, i.e., a turnaround. We compare communication from leaders to incentive increases and also compare the effectiveness of randomly selected and elected leaders. While all...

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 present a lab-field experiment designed to assess systematically the external validity of social preferences elicited in a variety of experimental games. We do this by comparing behavior in the different games with a number of behaviors elicited in the field and with self-reported behaviors...