Every year during school and college admissions, students and their parents devote considerable time and effort to acquiring costly information about their own preferences. In a market where students are ranked by universities based on exam scores, we explore ways to reduce wasteful information...

From the regulation of sports to lawmaking in parliament, in many situations one group of people ("agents") makes decisions that affect payoffs of others ("principals") who are inactive. As the principals have a stake in the agents' decisions they face an incentive to offer payments in order to...

In this paper we study the effects that loss contracts - prepayments that can be clawbacked later - have on group coordination when there is strategic uncertainty. We compare the choices made by experimental subjects in a minimum effort game. In control sessions, incentives are formulated as a...

From the regulation of sports to lawmaking in parliament, in many situations one group of people ("agents") make decisions that affect payoffs of others ("principals") who may offer action-contingent transfers in order to sway the agents' decisions. Prat and Rustichini (2003) characterize...

This paper experimentally studies two simple interventions aimed at increasing public goods provision in settings in which accurate feedback about contributions is not available. The first intervention aims to exploit lying aversion by requiring subjects to send a non-verifiable ex post...

From the regulation of sports to lawmaking in parliament, in many situations one group of people ("agents") make decisions that affect the payoffs of others ("principals") who may offer action-contingent transfers in order to sway the agents' decisions. Prat and Rustichini (2003) characterize...

We experimentally analyze leading by example in a public goods game with two permanent and two temporary group members. Our results show that leadership when permanent and temporary members interact leads to lower contributions than interaction without leadership.