Experimental evidence has accumulated highlighting the limitations of formal and explicit contracts in certain situations, and has identified environments in which informal and implicit contracts are more efficient. This paper documents the superior performance of explicit over implicit...

History-dependent strategies are often used to support cooperation in repeated game models. Using the indefinitely repeated common-pool resource assignment game and a perfect stranger experimental design, this paper reports novel evidence that players who have successfully used an...

This study reports a laboratory experiment wherein subjects play a hawk-dove game. We try to implement a correlated equilibrium with payoffs outside the convex hull of Nash equilibrium payoffs by privately recommending play. We find that subjects are reluctant to follow certain recommendations....

This experiment compares the performance of two contest designs: a standard winnertake- all tournament with a single fixed prize, and a novel proportional-payment design in which that same prize is divided among contestants by their share of total achievement. We find that proportional prizes...