Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central...

In the context of eliciting preferences for decision making under risk, we ask the question: “which might be the ‘best’ method for eliciting such preferences?”. It is well known that different methods differ in terms of the bias in the elicitation; it is rather less well-known that...

This paper reviews some of the economic experimental evidence on conformism. There is nothing to match the early psychology experiments where subjects were often swayed by the behaviour of others to an extraordinary degree, but there is plenty of evidence of conformism. This seems built-in to...

Industrial organization is mainly concerned with the behavior of large firms, especially when it comes to oligopoly theory. Experimental industrial organization therefore faces a problem: How can firms be brought into the laboratory? The main approach relies on framing: Call individuals firms!...

Many Western countries face the challenge of reconciling future labor demand with growing public opposition to immigration. The dynamics and underlying processes of setting immigration requirements remain unclear as research so far mainly focuses on context-specific empirical studies. We use a...

Models with heterogeneous interacting agents explain macro phenomena through interactions at the micro level. We propose genetic algorithms as a model for individual expectations to explain aggregate market phenomena. The model explains all stylized facts observed in aggregate price fluctuations...

There is a substantial literature examining coordination in public goods games. We conducted an experiment to explore how varying patterns of thresholds affect the willingness of subjects to contribute to a public good. We had subjects play a multiperiod game where each subject was allocated an...

The paper explores utility measures by combining experiments with mathematical derivations in psychophysics paradigm. The analysis on ultimatum game experiment reveals an evidence for utility threshold and thus supports Bernoulli's utility logarithmic law. Both experimental results and...