We collected personality (Big Five) and demographic characteristics, and ran incentivized experiments measuring cognitive skills (non-verbal IQ, numeracy, backward induction/ planning), and economic (time, risk) preferences, with 100 students at a small public undergraduate liberal arts college...

Economic analysis has said little about how an individual's cognitive skills (CS's) are related to the individual's preferences in different choice domains, such as risk-taking or saving, and how preferences in different domains are related to each other. Using a sample of 1,000 trainee truckers...

Evidence from psychology and economics indicates that many individuals overestimate their ability, both absolutely and relatively. We test three different theories about observed relative overconfidence. The first theory notes that simple statistical comparisons (for example, whether the...

Economists and psychologists have devised numerous instruments to measure time preferences and have generated a rich literature examining the extent to which time preferences predict important outcomes; however, we still do not know which measures work best. With the help of a large sample of...

We use a sequential prisoner's dilemma game to measure the other-regarding behavior in samples from three related populations in the upper Midwest of the United States: 100 college students, 94 non-student adults from the community surrounding the college and 1,069 adult trainee truckers in a...

We measure a specific form of other-regarding behavior, costly cooperation with an anonymous other, among 645 subjects at a trucker training program in the Midwestern US. Using subjects' second-mover strategy in a sequential form of the Prisoners' Dilemma, we categorize subjects as: Free Rider,...

A large literature in behavioral economics has emphasized in the last decades the role of individual differences in social preferences (such as trust and altruism) and in influencing behavior in strategic environments. Here we emphasize the role of attention and working memory, and show that...

We investigate in a laboratory setting whether revealing information on the intelligence of both players affects behavior in repeated games. We study the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD) and Battle of Sexes (BoS) as they cover a large set of the interesting scenarios generated by repeated games of two...

Intelligence affects social outcomes of groups. A systematic study of the link is provided in an experiment where two groups of subjects with different levels of intelligence, but otherwise similar, play a repeated prisoner's dilemma. The initial cooperation rates are similar, it increases in...

We use personality traits to better understand the relationship between income and life satisfaction. Personality traits mediate the effect of income on life satisfaction. The effect of neuroticism, which measures sensitivity to threat and punishment, is strong in both the British Household...