This paper examines the occurrence and fragility of information cascades in laboratory experiments. One group of low informed subjects make predictions in sequence. In a matched pairs design, another set of high informed subjects observe the decisions of the first group and make predictions....

Weizsäcker (2010) estimates the payoff of actions to test rational expectations and to measure the success of social learning in information cascade experiments. He concludes that participants perform poorly when learning from others and that rational expectations are violated. We show that his...

Based on the "acquiring-a-company" game of Samuelson and Bazerman (1985), we theoretically and experimentally analyze the acquisition of a firm. Thereby we compare cases of symmetrically and asymmetrically informed buyers and sellers. This setting allows us to predict and test the effects of...

E-nstructions facilitates the use of electronic instructions in computerized laboratory experiments. This tool has been primarily designed to be used in combination with z-Tree (Fischbacher, 2007), but it should work in combination with other experimental softwares which help developing and...

E-nstructions facilitates the use of electronic instructions in computerized laboratory experiments in social sciences. In this article I provide a set of guidelines for the installation and the use of E-nstructions. -- Experiments ; Experimental software ; Instructions

We revisit the economic models of social learning by assuming that individuals update their beliefs in a non-Bayesian way. Individuals either overweigh or underweigh (in Bayesian terms) their private information relative to the public information revealed by the decisions of others and each...

We investigate whether experimental participants follow their private information and contradict herds in situations where it is empirically optimal to do so. We consider two sequences of players, an observed and an unobserved sequence. Observed players sequentially predict which of two options...

This paper presents results from an experiment designed to study the effect of self reporting risk preferences on strategy choices made in a subsequently played 2 X 2 coordination game. The main finding is that the act of answering a questionnaire about one's own risk preferences significantly...

In this paper we treat instructions as an experimental variable. Using a public good game, we study how the instructions' format affects the participants' understanding of the experiment, their speed of play and their experimental behavior. We show that longer instructions do not significantly...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returns from the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presents experimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty depend on the employed parameterization. Specifically, if the value of the...