Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential theories in psychology, and its oldest experiential realization is choice-induced dissonance. In contrast to the economic approach of assuming a person's choices reveal their preferences, psychologists have claimed since 1956 that people alter...

The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this is so, extolling the virtues of equilibrium theory; then...

We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects. In a controlled laboratory experiment we show that exogenous variation of second-order expectations (promisors' expectations about promisees' expectations that the promise...

We compare general equilibrium economies in which building and maintenance of a depreciating public facility is financed either by anonymous voluntary contributions or by taxing agents on their income from private production. Agents start with an endowment of private goods and money, while the...

We replicate the essentials of the Huettel et al. (2006) experiment on choice under uncertainty with 30 Yale undergraduates, where subjects make 200 pair-wise choices between risky and ambiguous lotteries. Inferences about the independence of economic preferences for risk and ambiguity are...

Most theories of risky choice postulate that a decision maker maximizes the expectation of a Bernoulli (or utility or similar) function. We tour 60 years of empirical search and conclude that no such functions have yet been found that are useful for out-of-sample prediction. Nor do we find...

We compare laboratory general equilibrium economies in which maintenance of a depreciating public facility is financed either by anonymous voluntary contributions or taxes. Agents individually allocate their private goods between consumption and investment in production. The experimental...

We conduct two experiments where subjects make a sequence of binary choices between risky and ambiguous binary lotteries. Risky lotteries are defined as lotteries where the relative frequencies of outcomes are known. Ambiguous lotteries are lotteries where the relative frequencies of outcomes...

This paper is an exposition of an experiment on revealed preferences, where we posit a novel discrete binary choice model. To estimate this model, we use general estimating equations or GEE. This is a methodology originating in biostatistics for estimating regression models with correlated data....

This paper experimentally investigates cooperative game theory from a normative perspective. Subjects designated as Decision Makers express their view on what is fair for others, by recommending a payoff allocation for three subjects (Recipients) whose substitutabilities and complementarities...