Industries with significant scale economies or learning-by-doing may come to be dominated by a single firm. Economists have studied how likely this is to happen, and whether it is efficient, using models where buyers are price or quantity takers, even though these industries are often also...

We examine innovative contexts like scientific research or technical R&D where agents must search across many potential projects of varying and uncertain returns. Is it better to possess incomplete but accurate data on the value of some projects, or might there be cases where it is better to...

We analyze a coordination game with information-constrained players. The players' actions are based on a noisy compressed representation of the game's payoffs in a particular case, where the compressed representation is a latent state learned by a variational autoencoder (VAE). Our generalized...

The experimental literature on repeated games has largely focused on settings where players discount the future identically. In applications, however, interactions often occur between players whose time preferences differ. We study experimentally the effects of discounting differentials in...

Since formal rules can only partially reduce opportunistic behavior, third-party sanctioning to promote fairness is critical to achieving desirable social outcomes. Social norms may underpin such behavior, but they can also undermine it. We study one such norm the "don't be a toad" norm, as it...

Team incentives are important in many compensation systems that pay workers according to the output of their team as well as to their own output, with team bonuses often depending on whether the team meets or exceeds specified thresholds. Yet little is known about how team members with different...

We provide twelve best practices and discuss how each practice can help researchers accurately, credibly, and ethically use Generative AI (GenAI) to enhance experimental research. We split the twelve practices into four areas. First, in the pre-treatment stage, we discuss how GenAI can aid in...

Starting from Robbins (1952), the literature on experimentation via multi-armed bandits has wed exploration and exploitation. Nonetheless, in many applications, agents' exploration and exploitation need not be intertwined: a policymaker may assess new policies different than the status quo; an...

Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision such as Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, Hirohito's government launching a war against the United States, or Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even if the decision is not ultimately fatal for the...

Firms tend to compete more aggressively in financial distress; the intensified competition in turn reduces profit margins, pushing themselves further into distress and adversely affecting other firms. To study such feedback and contagion effects, we incorporate strategic competition into a...