Landberger et al. (2001) identified optimal bidder behavior in first- price private-value auctions when the ranking of valuations is common knowledge, and derived comparative-statics predictions regarding the auctioneer’s expected revenue and the efficiency of the allocation. The experiment...

It is often suggested that team spirit counteracts free-riding. Testing for team spirit with field data is difficult, however, due to an inherent identification problem. In this paper test for team spirit experimentally. In a team work task we vary subjects' information about relative team...

The influence of peer behavior on an individual's choices has received renewed interest in recent years. However, accurate measures of this influence are difficult to obtain. Standard reduced-form methods lead to upwardly biased estimates due to simultaneity, common shocks, and nonrandom peer...

Researchers and educators often argue that a student's peers strongly influence his or her educational outcomes. If so, an unequal distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students across schools in a community will leave many students doubly disadvantaged and amplify existing inequalities....

A number of studies have indicated that peer smoking is a highly influential factor in a young person's decision to smoke. However, these results are suspect because the studies often fail to account for selection and simultaneity bias. This paper develops an econometric model of youth smoking...

Local financing of public schools in the U.S. leads to a bundling of two distinct choices - residential choice and school choice - and increases the degree of socioeconomic segregation across school districts. A school finance reform can go a long way in weakening this link. In this paper I...

Reinforcement learning has proved quite successful in predicting subjects' adjustment behaviour in repeatedly played simple games. However, reinforcement learning does not predict convergence to the efficient cell in the minimal information game of mutual fate control, while earlier...

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...

We examine theoretically and experimentally two countervailing effects of collusion and symmetric mergers among bidders. On one hand, the pooling of information within bidding rings increases the precision of competing estimates. We demonstrate that, in average value auctions, this leads to more...

We study experimentally a class of pure coordination games as a special case of the Consumer Choice of Prizes game developed by Rapoport et al. (2000). We find a high level of group coordination coupled with considerable switching in the choice of locations. Two models are proposed and tested to...