The Klein-Leffler (1981) model of product quality does not explain why high-quality firms would dissipate the rents they earn from quality- assuring price premia, and it relies on consumers knowing the cost functions of firms. In the present paper, consumers do not know any firm's cost of...

Laboratory subjects repeatedly played one of two variations of a simple two-person zero-sum game of ``hide and seek.'' Three puzzling departures from the prescriptions of equilibrium theory are found in the data: an asymmetry related to the player's role in the game; an asymmetry across the game...

People can become less cooperative when threatened with sanctions, and researchers have pointed to both 'intentions' and incentives as sources of this effect. This paper reports data from a novel experimental design aimed at determining the relative importance of intentions and incentives in...

We present an experimental study on the wasted resources associated with tax evasion. This waste arises from taxpayers and tax authorities investing costly effort in the concealment and detection of tax evasion. We show that these socially inefficient efforts - as well as the frequency of tax...

We study search behavior in a generalized "secretary problem" environment in which consumers search sequentially for the best alternative from a known and finite set of multi-attribute alternatives. In contrast to most previous studies, we make no distributional assumptions about the quality of...

This paper explores, through a series of experiments, the effect of shill bidding upon revenues and prices in auctions. We study the practice of shill bidding in a common value framework. Our findings are consistent with the theoretical prediction that, if bidders are aware of the possibility of...

Tacit coordination is studied experimentally in a class of iterated market entry games with a relatively small number of potential entrants (n = 6), symmetric players, and fixed entry fees. These games are intended to simulate a situation where a newly emergent market opportunity may be...

This paper aims at presenting the methodological approach to simulations, proposed at the beginning of the sixties by a group of scholars of the Carnegie Mellon University. This approach can be defined cognitive and behavioural, because of the attention to real perception and decision-making and...