We study the role of experience in the formation of asset price bubbles. Therefore, we conduct two related experiments. One is a call market experiment in which participants trade assets with each other. The other is a learning-to-forecast experiment in which participants only forecast future...

One acclaimed role of managers is to monitor workers in team production processes and discipline them through the threat of terminating them from the team (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972). We extend a standard weakest link experiment with a manager that can decide to replace some of her team members...

We study the emergence of bubbles in a laboratory experiment with large groups of individuals. The realized price is the aggregation of the forecasts of a group of individuals, with positive expectations feedback through speculative demand. When prices deviate from fundamental value, a random...

We study a giver’s generosity depending on her relationship with the recipient and the observer. We assign different group identities to the players using a variation of the minimumgroup paradigm, and test the effect of group memberships on altruistic giving in the dictator game with a passive...

In many real-life situations people face a simple decision whether to volunteer or not to provide some benefit for themselves and also for others. This research investigates the effects of the group size and the magnitude of the volunteering cost in a controlled large-scale laboratory...

We consider the possibility that cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma is fostered by people's voluntarily enhancement of their own vulnerability. The vulnerability of a player determines the effectiveness of possible punishment by the other. In the 'Gradual' mechanism, players may condition their...

Expectations play a crucial role in modern macroeconomic models. We replace the common assumption of rational expectations in a New Keynesian framework by the assumption that expectations are formed according to a heuristics switching model that has performed well in earlier work. We show how...

In a competitive market with taxed transactions, it does not matter under full rationality which side of the market legally transfers the taxes. In the labor market, a tax levied on employers and a corresponding income tax levied on employees are equivalent. With boundedly rational agents, this...

Credit default swaps (CDS) played an important role in the financial crisis of 2008. While CDS can be used to hedge risks, they can also be used for speculative purposes (as occurred during the financial crisis) and regulations have been proposed to limit such speculative use. Here, we provide...

There are many situations in which different groups make collective decisions by committee voting, with each group represented by a single person. A natural question is what voting system such a committee should use. Concepts based on voting power provide guidelines for this choice. The two most...