How does overconfidence arise and persist in the face of experience and feedback? We examine experimentally how individuals' beliefs about their absolute, as opposed to relative, performance on a quiz react to noisy, but unbiased, feedback. Participants believe themselves to have received...

Beyond the classical reasons of efficiency, commitment, the distribution of information, or incentive provision, a person may also delegate decision rights so as to avoid blame for an unpopular or immoral decision. We show that by delegating to an intermediary, a dictator facing an allocation...

Previous economic experiments on dual-process reasoning in altruistic decisions have yielded inconclusive results. However, these studies do not create a conflict between affective and cognitive motives, resulting in imperfect identification. We interact standard cognitive and affective...

We test whether promises per se are effective in enhancing cooperative behavior in a form of trust game. In a new treatment, rather than permitting free-form messages, we instead allow only a bare promise-only message to be sent (or not). We find that bare promises are much less effective in...

We examine experimentally the impact of communication on trust and cooperation. Our design admits observation of promises, lies, and beliefs. The evidence is consistent with people striving to live up to others’ expectations in order to avoid guilt, as can be modeled using psychological...

Social norms involve observation by others and external sanctions for violations,while moral norms involve introspection and internal sanctions. We develop a simple model ofindividual preferences that incorporates moral and social norms. We then examine dictatorchoices, where we create a shared...

We document a lower bound for thecontrol premium: agents' willingness to pay to control their own payoff. Participants choose between an asset that will pay only if they later answer a particular quiz question correctly and one that pays only if their partner answers a different question...

We tested the effects of various of policy rules on retailer behavior in laboratory experiments conducted at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Our experimental design models the multifaceted contemporary market for consumer computer products and is quite complex, but we found that participants can...