In financial markets, professional traders leverage their trades because it allows to trade larger positions with less margin. Violating margin requirements, however, triggers a margin call and open positions are automatically covered until requirements are met again. What impact does margin...

Bubbles are omnipresent in lab experiments with asset markets. But these experiments were (mostly) conducted in environments with only human traders. Today markets are substantially determined by algorithmic traders. Here we use a laboratory experiment to measure human trading behaviour changes...

We study two person-betting games with inconsistent commonly know beliefs, using an experimental approach. In our experimental games, participants bet against one another, each bettor choosing one of two possible outcomes, and payoff odds are know at the time bets are placed. Bettors' beliefs...

In-group favoritism in social dilemma situations is one of the main findings of studies in Social Identity Theory. We investigate what causes the in-group bias: is it due to mere group affiliation or, alternatively, is guilt-aversion a possible explanation? We induce group membership in a...

The unmediated call auction is a useful trading mechanism to aggregate dispersed information. Its ability to incorporate information of a single informed insider, however, is less well understood. We analyse this question by presenting a simple call auction game where both auction prices and...

Two pairs of two participants each interact repeatedly in two structurally independent but informationally linked Prisoner's Dilemma games. Neither pair receives feedback about past choices by their own partner but is fully informed about the choices by the other pair. Considering this as a...

This study investigates experimentally whether people in retrospective are self-aware that they engage in status-seeking behavior. Subjects participated in a real-effort task where effort translated into a donation to a charity. Within-subjects we varied the visibility of their performance...

Empirical studies show that agents often violate Bayes' rule in updating probability expectations. This paper deals with errors in combining observations with prior knowledge. Such errors neccessarily occur when agents have limited information-processing capacities. It is shown that rational...

In experimental economics there exists a lively debate about the independence of observations. Although opinions on the issue differ widely, all concerns regard the independence of subjects' behavior within one session or experiment. This paper attempts to shed some light on the independence of...

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have to adjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on. This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial. We ?rst develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...