Pay What You Want (PWYW) and Name Your Own Price (NYOP) are customer driven pricing mechanisms that give customers (some) pricing power. Both have been used in service industries with high fixed costs to price discriminate without setting a reference price. Their participatory and innovative...

Recent studies investigate policies motivating consumers to make an active choice as a way to protect unsophisticated consumers. We analyze the optimal timing of such choice-enhancing policies when a firm can strategically react to them. In our model, a firm provides a contract with automatic...

In this note we shall discuss a concept that - despite its prominence in both Hume (1739) and Smith (1759), its obvious relevance for social behavior, and its not so infrequent use in colloquial language - has never gained a foothold in economic theory: the concept of empathy. Specifically, we...

We model firms’ quality disclosure and pricing in the presence of cursed consumers, who fail to be sufficiently skeptical about undisclosed quality. We show that cursed consumers are exploited in duopoly markets if firms are vertically differentiated, if there are few cursed consumers, and if...

Why are people so often overconfident? We conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis that people become overconfident to more effectively persuade or deceive others. After performing a cognitively challenging task, half of our subjects are informed that they can earn money by convincing others...

For the procurement of complex goods the early exchange of information is important to avoid costly renegotiation. If the buyer can specify the main characteristics of possible design improvements in a complete contingent contract, a scoring auction implements the efficient allocation. If this...

Perceived urgency and regret are common in many sequential search processes; for example, sellers often pressure buyers in search of the best offer, both time-wise and in terms of potential regret of forgoing unique purchasing opportunities. theoretically, these strategies result in anticipated...

Do people blame refugees for negative events? We propose a novel experimental paradigm to measure discrimination in responsibility attribution towards Arabic refugees. Participants in the laboratory experience a positive or negative income shock, which is with equal probability caused by a...

We solve the equilibrium market structure in a labor market where vacancies and unemployed workers can meet either in an intermediated market where wages are determined by take-it-orleave- it offers, or in a directed search market where firms post wages. By using an intermediary agents avoid the...

We study the effects of different tax reporting mechanisms in experi-mental double auction markets in the laboratory. The sales tax is paidby the seller, and we compare market outcomes in a no-tax conditionto cases where (i) tax evasion is impossible, (ii) taxes can be evaded butthere is an...