In their seminal work, The Calculus of Consent (1962), Buchanan and Tullock develop a decision model which embodies fundamental relation­ships relevant to institutional choices. However, the Buchanan-Tullock model remains "general," thus inviting others to specify details and to develop...

This study reports an experiment that examines whether groups can better comply with theoretical predictions than individuals in contests. Our experiment replicates previous findings that individual players significantly overbid relative to theoretical predictions, incurring substantial losses....

Better forecasts of decisions in conflict situations, such as occur in business, politics, and war, can help protagonists achieve better outcomes. It is common advice to “stand in the other person’s shoes” when involved in a conflict, a procedure we refer to as “role thinking.” We...

We study the relationship between the cognitive load manipulation and strategic sophistication. The cognitive load manipulation is designed to reduce the subject's cognitive resources which are available for deliberation on a choice. In our experiment, subjects are placed under a large cognitive...

We study the relationship between the cognitive load manipulation and strategic sophistication. The cognitive load manipulation is designed to reduce the subject's cognitive resources that are available for deliberation on a choice. In our experiment, subjects are placed under a high cognitive...

This paper investigates the conventional wisdom that markets would naturally allocate the rights for performing decisional task to those players who might be best suited to perform the task. We embedded the decisional tasks in a stylised setting of a game, motivated by Littlewood(1953) Red Hat...

We conduct two experiements of the claim that people are overconfident. We develop new tests of overplacement which are based on a formal Bayesian model. Our two experiments, on easy quizzes, find overplacement. More precisely, we find apparently overconfident data that cannot be accounted for...

Publicly reported information on the environmental behavior of firms can increase the efficacy of private markets as a mechanism to control environmental malfeasance through liability for harm, consumer demand response, and shareholder reaction. In the case of mandatory information disclosure...

The paper deals with the impact of beauty on employability of people, stressing the first stage of the hiring process. In particular, we studied if there exists a preference for attractive candidates and if it does whether it depends on sex, physical features and racial characteristics. We...

We find that differences in the ability to devote cognitive resources to a strategic interaction imply differences in strategic behavior. In our experiment, we manipulate the availability of cognitive resources by applying a differential cognitive load. In cognitive load experiments, subjects...