Users of the social networking service Facebook have the possibility to post status updates for their friends to read. In turn, friends may react to these short messages by writing comments or by pressing a Like button to show their appreciation. Making use of five Swedish accounts, we set up a...

We examine the risky choices of contestants in the popular TV game show “Deal or No Deal” and related classroom experiments. Contrary to the traditional view of expected utility theory, the choices can be explained in large part by previous outcomes experienced during the game. Risk aversion...

Using cultural transmission, we develop a model that gives some microfoundation to the impact of residential neighborhood on children's educational attainment and then test it using the UK National Child Development Study. We find that, for high-educated parents, the better the quality of the...

Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of girls in the classroom on achievement of boys and girls. This study examines whether these results can be extrapolated to post-secondary education. We conduct an experiment in which the shares of girls in...

This study uses a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to examine the impact of different payment options on charitable giving. Households are randomly divided into three treatments, distinguished by the possibility for respondents to donate cash, by debit card, or both. I find that due to...

We use data from a promotion campaign of NH-Hoteles to study self-selection of participants in a gift-exchange experiment. The promotion campaign allowed guests to pay any non negative amount of money for a stay in one of 36 hotels in Belgium and the Netherlands. The data allow us to distinguish...

We analyze the behavior of experts who quote forecasts for monthly SKU-level sales data where we compare data before and after the moment that experts received different kinds of feedback on their behavior. We have data for 21 experts located in as many countries who make SKU-level forecasts for...

We test whether people’s tendency to stick with the default option can help save resources. In a natural field experiment we switch printers’ default settings, from simplex to duplex printing, at a large Swedish university. The results confirm that roughly one third of all printing is...

We analyze one of the explanations why people participate in lotteries. Our hypothesis stipulates that part of the value that a unit of money buys in lotteries is consumed before the actual resolution in the form of emotions such as hope. In other words, a person holding a lottery ticket may...

We ran a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain consisting of 128 stores. In a random sample of these stores, we introduced short-term sales competitions among subsets of stores. We find that sales competitions have a large effect on sales growth, but only in stores where the store's manager...