Using a real-effort experiment, we study whether group identity affects unethical behavior in a contest game. We vary whether minimal group identity is induced or not, whether individuals have to report their own outcome or the outcome of their competitor, and whether pairs of competitors share...

We study the choice of a principal to either delegate a decision to a group of careerist experts, or to consult them individually and keep the decision-making power. Our model predicts a trade-off between information acquisition and information aggregation. On the one hand, the expected benefit...

We investigate how group boundaries, and the economic environment surrounding groups, affect altruistic cooperation and punishment behavior. Our study uses experiments conducted with 525 officers in the Swiss Army, and exploits random assignment to platoons. We find that, without competition...

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

The objective of this paper is to design a laboratory experiment for an infinite-horizon sequential committee search model in order to test some of the implications obtained by the model in Albrecht, Anderson, and Vroman (2010) (AAV). We find that, compared with single-agent search, the search...

This paper investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations and markets. Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is...

We consider the voting behavior of Supreme Court Justices, finding evidence of co-dependencies in their votes. Coincident with changes in the party imbalance of the Court over time, sharp discontinuities in these dependencies are evident. Overall, the patterns suggest a tradeoff between...

Many important intertemporal decisions are made by groups rather than individuals. What happens to collective decisions when there is internal conflict about the tradeoff between present and future has not been thoroughly investigated so far. We study experimentally the causal effect of group...

We present an experiment on strategic thinking and behavior of individuals and teams in one-shot normal-form games. Besides making choices, decision makers have to state their first- and second-order beliefs. We find that teams play the Nash strategy significantly more often, and their choices...