The present article builds on a background paper that was commissioned for a “Witness Seminar” in 2010 that had a dozen prominent experimental economists -- witnesses, indeed -- discuss the origin and evolution of experimental economics. Rather than providing a history of the experimental...

Null Hypothesis Significance Testing has been widely used in the experimental economics literature. Typically, attention is restricted to type-I-errors. We demonstrate that not taking type-II errors into account is problematic. We also provide evidence, for one prominent area in experimental...

We study how donors decide which charity to give to. To this end, we construct a theoretical model that clarifies the conditions in which the stand-alone benefit from giving, price of giving, and cost of information acquisition inform giving decisions. The model shows that giving decisions are...

Self-regulatory organizations (SROs) can be found in education, healthcare, and other not-for-profit sectors as well as the accounting, financial, and legal professions. DeMarzo et al. (2005) show theoretically that SROs can create monopoly market power for their affiliated agents, but that...

The literature on dictator [D] and joy-of-destruction [JoD] games demonstrates that people can be nice and nasty. We study, by way of an experiment with between-subjects and within-subjects features, to what extent behaviors are context dependent and consistent. We find that, for one-shot D and...

In this paper, we reproduce Engel’s (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments using his data, and then replicate it using our own data. We find that Engel’s (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments is quite robust. We show that meta-analyses of dictator game experiments depend to...

To discuss experimental results without discussing how they came about makes sense when the results are robust to the way experiments are conducted. Experimental results, however, are – arguably more often than not – sensitive to numerous design and implementation characteristics such as the...

We report the results of two laboratory experiments that study how university student and staff participants chose retirement savings investment options using ‘user-friendly' information prescribed by regulators. We demonstrate that choices of more than 20% of participants cannot be predicted...

We try to better understand the comparative advantages of structural and behavioral remedies of deregulation in electricity markets, an eminent policy issue for which the experimental evidence is scant and problematic. Specifically, we investigate theoretically and experimentally the effects on...

Low levels of non-default decision making among superannuation members in Australia are assumed to be evidence of lack of interest and capability. Using member records and survey data from a large Australian superannuation fund we test the relationship between attitudes towards retirement...