We provide causal evidence that patience is a significant source of bargaining power. Generalizing the Rubinstein (1982) bargaining model to arbitrarily non-stationary discounting, we first show that dynamic consistency across bargaining rounds is sufficient for a unique equilibrium, which we...

The common use of majority rule in group decision making is puzzling. In theory, it inequitably favors the proposer, and paradoxically, it disadvantages voters further if they are inequity averse. In practice, however, outcomes are equitable. The present paper analyzes data from a novel...

A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases performance of contestants because of the "discouragement effect." Leveling the playing field by favoring weaker contestants through bid-caps and favorable tie-breaking rules can reduce the...

Anchoring is one of the most studied and robust behavioral biases, but there is little knowledge about its persistence in strategic settings. This article studies the role of anchoring bias in private-value auctions. We test experimentally two different anchor types. The announcement of a random...

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...

In symmetric binary-choice coordination games, the global-game selection (GGS) has been proven to predict a high proportion of observed choices correctly. In these games, the GGS is identical to the best response to Laplacian beliefs about the fraction of players choosing either action. This...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's belief about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. A growing number of surveys and experiments ask participants to state beliefs explicitly but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and...

Informal exchange of information among competitors has been well-documented in a variety of industries, and one's expectation of reciprocity shown to be a key determinant. We use an indeterminate horizon centipede game to establish a feedback loop in the laboratory and show that an individual's...

This paper presents an analysis of general time preferences in the canonical Rubinstein (1982) model of bargaining, allowing for arbitrarily history-dependent strategies. I derive a simple sufficient structure for optimal punishments and thereby fully characterize (i) the set of equilibrium...

Agents with reciprocal preferences prefer to be matched to a partner who also likes to collaborate with them. In this paper, we introduce and formalize reciprocal preferences, apply them to matching markets, and analyze the implications for mechanism design. Formally, the preferences of an agent...