A contract auction establishes a contract between a center and one of the bidders. As contracts may describe many terms, preferences over contracts typically display indifferences. The Qualitative Vickrey Auction (QVA) selects the best contract for the winner that is at least as good for the...

Cheating such as corruption and tax evasion is prevalent in the developing world; therefore, many interventions have been undertaken to reduce cheating in developing countries. Although some field evidence shows that poverty is correlated with cheating, the causal effect of poverty on cheating in...

We introduce noise in the signaling technology of an otherwise standard wasteful signaling model (Spence, 1973). We theoretically derive the properties of the equilibria under different levels of noise and we experimentally test how behavior changes with noise. We obtain three main insights....

An apology is a strong and cheap device to restore social or economic relationships that have been disturbed. In a laboratory experiment in which apologies emerge endogenously, we find that harmdoers use apologies in particular if they fear punishment and if their intentions cannot be easily...

In a credence goods game with an expert and a consumer, we study experimentally the impact of two devices that are predicted to induce consumer-friendly behavior if the expert has a propensity to feel guilty when he believes that he violates the consumerʼs payoff expectations: (i) an...

Punishment typically involves depriving violators of resources they own such as money or labor. These resources can become revenue for authorities and thus motivate profit-seeking punishment. In this paper, we design a novel experiment to provide direct evidence on the role punishment plays in...

We investigate a private value auction in which a single “entrant” on winning imposes a negative externality on two “regular” bidders. In an English auction when all bidders are active, “regular” bidders free ride, exiting before price reaches their values. In a first-price...

This paper investigates the role of endogenous timing of decisions on coordination under asymmetric information. In the equilibrium of a global coordination game, where players choose the timing of their decision, a player who has sufficiently high beliefs about the state of the economy...

The lack of price guidance towards efficiency relevant packages in ascending combinatorial clock auctions (ACCA) can lead to a low-efficiency allocation of goods. We propose a descending price combinatorial clock auction (DCCA) with a newly devised pricing strategy to improve on this problem....

We compare competing college admission matching mechanisms that differ in preference submission timing (pre-exam, post-exam but pre-score, or post-score) and in matching procedure (Boston (BOS) and serial dictatorship (SD) matching). Pre-exam submission asks students to submit college...