This paper examines the chance of winning a Tullock-contest when participants differ in both their talent and their attitude towards risk. For the case of CARA preferences, it is shown that the winning probability may be higher for a low-skilled agent with a low degree of risk aversion than for...

We study equilibrium reporting behavior in Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013)-type cheating games when agents have a fixed cost of lying and image concerns not to be perceived as a liar. We show that equilibria naturally arise in which agents with low costs of lying randomize among a set of...

Private provision of public goods often takes place as a war of attrition: individuals wait until someone else volunteers and provides the good. After a certain time period, however, one individual may be randomly selected. If the individuals are uncertain about their cost of provision, but can...

We consider an experiment with a version of the Battle of the Sexes game with two-sided private information, allowing a possible round of either one-way or two-way cheap talk before the game is played. We compare different treatments to study truthful revelation of information and subsequent...

This paper characterizes geometrically the set of all Nash equilibrium payoffs achievable with unmediated communication in persuasion games, i.e., games with an informed expert and an uninformed decisionmaker in which the expert's information is certifiable. The first equilibrium...

We consider the aggregation of individual agents' von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences over lotteries into a social planner's von Neumann-Morgenstern preference. We start from Harsanyi's axiomatization of utilitarianism, and ask under which conditions a social preference order that satisfies...

This paper studies how updating affects ambiguity-attitude. In particular we focus on the generalized Bayesian update of the Jaffray-Phillipe sub-class of Choquet Expected Utility preferences. We find conditions for ambiguity-attitude to be the same before and after updating. A necessary and...

Beliefs are a central determinant of behavior. Recent models assume that beliefs about or the anticipation of future consumption have direct utility consequences. This gives rise to informational preferences, i.e., preferences over the timing and structure of information. Using a novel and...

This paper considers how optimal education and tax policy depends on the risk properties of human capital. It is demonstrated that a key feature of human capital investments is whether they increase or decrease wage risk. In a benchmark model it is shown that this feature alone determines...

This study explores people's risk attitudes after having suffered large real-world losses following a natural disaster. Using the margins of the 2011 Australian floods (Brisbane) as a natural experimental setting, we find that homeowners who were victims of the floods and face large losses in...