We elicit time preferences of a representative sample of 1,102 Dutch individuals and also confront them with a series of incentivized investment decisions. There are two treatments which di¤er by the frequency at which individuals decide about the invested amount. The low frequency treatment...

Revealed preference theory o¤ers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function that the choices maximize. We conduct a large-scale ?eld experiment that enables us to test subjects?choices for consistency with utility maximization and...

Entrusting the power to punish to a central authority is a hallmark of civilization. We study a collective action dilemma in which self-interest should produce a sub-optimal outcome absent sanctions for non-cooperation. We then test experimentally whether subjects make the theoretically optimal...

The sanctioning of norm-violating behavior by an effective formal authority is an efficient solution for social dilemmas. It is in the self-interest of voters and is often favorably contrasted with letting citizens take punishment into their own hands. Allowing informal sanctions, by contrast,...

Schaffer (1988) proposed a concept of evolutionary stability for finite-population models that has interesting implications in economic models of evolutionary learning, since it is related to perfectly competitive equilibrium. The present paper explores the relation of this concept to Nash...

The well-known double marginalization problem understates the inefficiencies arising from vertical relations in consumer search markets where consumers are uninformed about the wholesale prices charged by manufacturers to retailers. Con- sumer search provides a monopoly manufacturer with an...

We study vertical relations in markets with consumer and retailer search. Retailers search to learn manufacturers' prices. We obtain three important new results. First, we explain why empirical distributions of retail prices are bi- modal, with a regular price and a sales price. Second, under...

When consumers search sequentially for prices and product matches, their beliefs of what they will encounter at the next rm are important in deciding whether or not to continue to search. In search environments where retailers have a common cost that is not known to consumers and is either the...

This paper studies observational learning in a consumer search environment. In our model, consumers observe the purchasing decision of a predecessor before deciding which rm to visit. We show that if consumers emulate their predecessor and initiate their search at the rm she purchased from, a...

Incentivized methods for eliciting subjective probabilities in economic experiments present the subject with risky choices or bets that encourage truthful reporting. We discuss the most prominent elicitation methods and their underlying assumptions, provide theoretical comparisons, and propose...