We explore the influence of cognitive ability and judgment on strategic behavior in the beauty contest game (where the Nash equilibrium action is zero). Using the level-k model of bounded rationality, cognitive ability and judgment both predict higher level strategic thinking. However,...

A burgeoning literature in economics has started examining the role of social norms in explaining economic behavior. Surprisingly, the vast majority of this literature has studied social norms in asocial decision settings, where individuals are observed to act in isolation from each other. In...

According to Chen's (2013) linguistic-savings hypothesis, languages which grammatically separate the future and the present (like English or Italian) induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future by using present tense (like German). We complement...

This paper investigates how Confucianism affects individual decision making in Taiwan and in China. We found that Chinese subjects in our experiments became less accepting of Confucian values, such that they became significantly more risk loving, less loss averse, and more impatient after being...

This paper analyzes 12,596 wagering decisions of 6,064 contestants in the US game show Jeopardy!, focusing on the anchoring phenomenon in financial decision-making. We find that contestants anchor heavily on the initial dollar value of a clue in their wagering decision, even though there exists...

Does it matter if you speak with a regional accent? Speaking immediately reveals something of one's own social and cultural identity, be it consciously or unconsciously. Perceiving accents involves not only reconstructing such imprints but also augmenting them with particular attitudes and...

Recent examinations into the cognitive underpinnings of ethical decision making has focused on understanding whether honesty is more likely to result from deliberative or unconscious decision processes. We randomly assigned participants to a multi-night sleep manipulation, after which they...

We examine whether biases identified in the behavioral-economics literature apply in decision-making for others (DMfO). We conduct a laboratory experiment in which subjects make decision on behalf of themselves and others in eighteen tasks that measure the following biases: present-bias in time...