This paper extends existing evidence on the interaction and relative productivity of cognitive effort and cognitive capital in an experimental environment. I focus on the impact of task-specific cognitive capital, which is central to the capital-labor argument of Camerer and Hogarth (1999) as...

Gneezy, List and Wu [Q. J. Econ. 121 (2006) 1283-1309] document that lotteries are often valued less than the lotteries’ worst outcomes. We show how to undo this result.

In a series of articles and manuscripts (e.g., Kruger & Dunning, 1999, Dunning et al.,2003, Ehrlinger et al., 2005), Dunning, Kruger and their collaborators argued that the unskilled lack the metacognitive ability to realize their incompetence. We propose that the unskilled-and-unaware problem...

The so-called unskilled-and-unaware problem was experimentally identified a decade ago: The unskilled are seemingly afflicted by a double curse because they also seem unaware of their (relative) lack of skills. Numerous authors have elaborated on this problem – experimentally as well as...

Drawing on Gneezy and Rustichini (2000), we illustrate that subjects' cognitive abilities seem at least as important for their performance as do financial incentives they face. Theorists should thus pay more attention to the ability aspect of cognitive production.

We replicate three pricing tasks of Gneezy, List and Wu (2006) for which they document the so-called uncertainty effect, namely, that people value a binary lottery over non-monetary outcomes less than other people value the lottery’s worse outcome. While the authors implemented a verbal...

Learning is a subject of intense research in experimental economics. We contribute to this debate by presenting persuasive evidence that learning took place among uninformed heterogeneous agents on a quasi-stock market during a large-scale natural experiment that by size, incentives, and...

We link two important ideas: attention is scarce and a lack of information about an individual drives discrimination in selection decisions. We model how knowledge of ethnicity influences allocation of attention to available information about an applicant. When only a small share of applicants...

The stability of many post-conflict societies rests on the successful reintegration of former soldiers. We use an experimental approach to study reintegration in Northern Uganda and examine behavior of former soldiers together with the behavior of receiving communities towards this group. We...

Read (2005), in The Journal of Economic Methodology, took our target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Hertwig & Ortmann 2001) as one point of departure to question the usefulness of monetary incentives for experimental work. In making his case, he misrepresents our analysis, and...