Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of "social preferences". We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing...

This study describe an experiment on individual learning in the domain of cognitive economics. The authors’ main goal is to observe and to describe how subjects elaborate rules and regularities in problem solving. Involved subjects are asked to choose between different scores related to an...

Investors systematically deviate from rationality when making financial decisions, yet the mechanisms responsible for these deviations have not been identified. Using event-related fMRI, we examined whether anticipatory neural activity would predict optimal and suboptimal choices in a financial...

Our study concerns bargaining behavior in situations where one party is in a stronger position than the other. We investigate both the tradeoff the favored party makes between pursuing his strategic advantage and giving weight to other players' concern for fairness, and the tradeoff the...

We perform a further experiment to check the robustness of the main result in Rey Biel (2005) to sequential play. We find that Equilibrium predictions work even better when the same games are played sequentially: 85% of first movers choose the Equilibrium strategy and 85% of second movers best...

One of the most robust findings in experimental analysis in economics is that subjects often display a large discrepancy between the dollar value they are willing to accept in order to sell an item (WTA) and the dollar value they are willing to pay to purchase it (WTP). We suggest that often...

We report the results of an experiment on a continuous version of the minimum effort coordination game. The introduction of within-team competition significantly increases effort levels relative to a baseline with no competition and increases coordination relative to a secure treatment where the...

Principals can attempt to get agents to perform certain actions preferable to the principal by using ex post}punishments and rewards to align incentives. Field data is mixed on whether, and to what extent, such informal incentive contracting (paradoxically) crowds out efficient solutions to the...

It has been long recognized that different people may use different strategies, or decision rules, when playing games or dealing with other complex decision problems. We provide a new Bayesian procedure for drawing inferences about the nature and number of decision rules that are present in a...

We study experimentally two versions of a model in which a buyer and a seller bargain over the price of a good; however, the buyer can choose to leave the negotiation table to search for other alternatives. Under one version, if the buyer chooses to search for a better price, the opportunity to...