The endowment effect describes the fact that people demand much more to give up an object than they are willing to spend to acquire it. The existence of this effect has been documented in numerous experiments. We attempt to explain this effect by showing that evolution favors individuals whose...

Recently, the theory of informational cascades has been tested in an experiment by Anderson and Holt (1997) who report that their data support the theory amazingly well. In this note we report on an experiment designed to find out whether observed cascades are indeed due to rational Bayesian...

We report results of a series of experiments designed to test the stability of the best reply process. With linear demand and cost functions, the process is stable if and only if there are less than three firms in the market. However, we find no experimental evidence of such instability in a...

In a seminal paper Bagwell (1995) claims that the first mover advantage, i.e. the strategic benefit of committing oneself to an action before others can do, vanishes completely if this action is only imperfectly observed by second movers. In our paper we report on an experimental test of this...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation models and subject the models to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysis we find that the different predictions of previous imitation models are due to different informational assumptions, not to different...

This paper investigates the impact of information about rivals' actions on the competitiveness of experimental oligopoly markets. We compare two treatments: in one, firms are informed about their rivals' actions and profits. In the other, firms are only given some aggregate information about...

In this paper we study the mechanics of ``leading by example'' in teams. Leadership is beneficial for the entire team when agents are conformists, i.e., dislike effort differentials. We also show how leadership can arise endogenously and discuss what type of leader benefits a team most.

Experimental results on the ultimatum game show clearly that (1) large fractions of players offer a 'fair' allocation and (2) that unfair (but positive) offers are systematically rejected. We offer an explanation of this behavior using the 'indirect evolutionary approach' which is based on the...

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the extended game with action commitment of Hamilton and Slutsky (1990). In their duopoly game, firms can choose their quantities in one of two periods before the market clears. If a firm commits to a quantity in period 1 it does not know whether the...

In this note we study a very simple trial & error learning process in the context of a Cournot oligopoly. Without any knowledge of the payoff functions players increase, respectively decrease, their quantity by one unit as long as this leads to higher profits. We show that this process converges...