Little is known about how gamblers estimate probabilities from multiple information sources. This paper reports on a preregistered study that administered an incentivized Bayesian choice task to n=465 participants (self-reported gamblers and non-gamblers). Our data failed to support our main...

This paper examines the impact of a commonly experienced adverse cognitive state on decision making under uncertainty. Specifically, we administer an at-home sleep restriction protocol combined with random assignment to the time-of-day for decision making. Thus, we induce sleepiness in our...

This paper develops and applies a Bayesian approach to Exploratory Factor Analysis that improves on ad hoc classical approaches. Our framework relies on dedicated factor models and simultaneously determines the number of factors, the allocation of each measurement to a unique factor, and the...

We investigate the relationship between social interaction and household finances using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We contribute to the existing literature by exploring the relationship between a wide range of aspects of household finances and social interaction, rather than...

We determine the scoring rule that is most likely to select a high-ability candidate. A major result is that neither the widely used plurality rule nor the inverse-plurality rule are ever optimal, and that the Borda rule is hardly ever optimal. Furthermore, we show that only the...

This paper studies the impact of immigration on public policy setting. As a natural experiment, we exploit the sudden arrival of eight million forced migrants in West Germany after World War II. These migrants were on average poorer than the West German population, but unlike most international...

Institutions are an important means for fostering prosocial behaviors, but in many contexts their scope is limited and they govern only a subset of all socially desirable acts. We use a laboratory experiment to study how the presence and nature of an institution that enforces prosocial behavior...

We consider a framework where the optimal decision rule determining the collective choice depends in a simple way on the decision makers' posterior probabilities of a particular state of nature. Nevertheless, voting is generally an inefficient way to make collective choices and this paper sheds...

This paper looks at the financial resources of trades unions in the UK, both updating previous work and attempting to understand the management of first and second order collective action problems. First order problems refer to the problems of initiating collective action and second order...