In an experiment that elicits subjects' willingness to pay (WTP) for the outcome of a lottery, we confirm the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes described by Kahneman and Tversky. In addition, we document a systematic effect of stake sizes on the magnitude and sign of the relative risk premium,...

Most economic analyses presume that there are limited differences in the prior beliefs of individuals, as assumption most often justified by the argument that sufficient common experiences and observations will eliminate disagreements. We investigate this claim using a simple model of Bayesian...

The influence of behavioral biases on aggregate outcomes like prices and allocations depends in part on self-selection: whether rational people opt more strongly into aggregate interactions than biased individuals. We conduct a series of betting market, auction and committee experiments using 15...

Rational agents must perform backwards induction by thinking contingently about future states and actions, but failures of backwards induction and contingent reasoning are ubiquitous. How do boundedly-rational agents make decisions when they fail to correctly forecast actions in the future? We...

We study the generation, transmission, and effects of causal narratives - narratives which describe a (potentially incorrect) causal relationship between variables. In a controlled experiment, we show that exogenously generated causal narratives manipulate the beliefs and actions of subjects in...

We conduct a novel lab experiment in which pairs of subjects make separable decisions about allocative efficiency and equity in different agency structures. In terms of equity, subjects appropriate all surplus when they can, and share equally when they have to negotiate. They achieve high...

We provide evidence of a powerful barrier to social learning: people are much less sensitive to information others discover compared to equally-relevant information they discover themselves. In a series of incentivized lab experiments, we ask participants to guess the color composition of balls...

We demonstrate the pitfalls when extrapolating behavioral findings across different contexts and decision environments. We focus on regret theory and the use of "regret lotteries" for motivating behavior change. Here, findings from one-shot settings have been used to promote regret as a tool to...