This paper reports an experimental investigation of a trust game using either cash or class credit as incentives to participants. We recruit from two auditorium classes. In one class, each token has cash value; in the other, each token is worth extra-credit points added to the students’ overall...

This note presents results from modified dictator games in which the payoff-relevant game is either chosen randomly or by the recipients. We do not observe reciprocal behavior when recipients choose the game: Dictators do not condition their donations on the game chosen by recipients.

It is standard in experimental economics to use decontextualized designs where payoff structures are presented using neutral language. Here we show that cooperation in such a neutrally framed Prisoner’s Dilemma is equivalent to a PD framed as contributing to a cooperative endeavour....

We show that subjects who set their minimum acceptable offer to zero in an ultimatum game are the most generous players in a dictator game. This finding challenges the interpretation of the acceptance of low offers as payoff-maximizing behavior.

We study the welfare implications of public information precision in a beauty contest framework allowing for optimal stabilization policies and information obfuscation. When policy makers’ ability to obfuscate information is constrained, increasing public information precision can be welfare...

This paper provides an analysis of solutions for allocation problems from an axiomatic point of view, proposing a decomposition for the space of such problems into direct sum of irreducible subspaces that are relevant to the study of linear symmetric solutions. In particular, we obtain...

We study a decentralized trading model as in Peters (1984a), where heterogeneous market participants face a trade-off between price and trade probability. We present a novel proof of existence of a unique demand vector in Nash equilibrium, based on a recursive approach that exploits the...

In social choice settings with linear preferences, random dictatorship is known to be the only social decision scheme satisfying strategyproofness and ex post efficiency. When also allowing indifferences, random serial dictatorship (RSD) is a well-known generalization of random dictatorship that...

Consider a contest for a prize in which each player knows his/her own ability, but may or may not know those of his/her rivals (the complete or incomplete information regimes). Our main result is that, if the value of the prize is high, more effort and output are engendered under incomplete...

In an experiment, a group of strangers was randomly divided in pairs to play a prisoners’ dilemma; this process was indefinitely repeated. Cooperation did not increase when subjects could send public messages amounting to binding promises of future play.