This paper experimentally studies two simple interventions aimed at increasing public goods provision in settings in which accurate feedback about contributions is not available. The first intervention aims to exploit lying aversion by requiring subjects to send a non-verifiable ex post...

Individuals and two-person teams play a hidden - action trust game with pre - play communication. We replicate previous results for individuals that non-binding promises increase cooperation rates. But this does not extend to teams. Wh ile teams make non-binding promises to cooperate at the same...

Prior laboratory experiments have studied general equilibrium economies constructed from "induced preferences" for artificial goods. We introduce new methods that allow us to study economies constructed instead from subjects' actual, "homegrown" preferences. Our subjects reveal their preferences...

We report an experiment on the Probabilistic Serial (PS) mechanism for allocating indivisible goods. The PS mechanism, a recently discovered alternative to the widely used Random Serial Dictatorship mechanism, has attractive fairness and efficiency properties if people report their preferences...

We introduce new graphical displays that present binary choice lotteries via three dimensional rotating pie charts whose heights represent the prize amounts. We compare four graphical versions to the original text-only Holt & Laury (2002) multiple price list. Parametric and non-parametric...

We investigate whether depleting people's cognitive resources (or willpower) affects the degree to which they are susceptible to framing effects. Recent research in social psychology and economics has suggested that willpower is a resource that can be temporarily depleted and that a depleted...

Prospect theory (PT) is the dominant descriptive theory of decision making under risk today. For the modeling of choices, PT relies on a psychologically founded separation of risk attitudes into attitudes towards outcomes, captured in a value function; and attitudes towards probabilities,...

We explore a variety of risk preference elicitation procedures that involve direct choice from a set of lotteries, including budget lines (BL) and binary choice lists (HL). We find statistically significant violations of the expected utility hypothesis (EUH) consistent with disappointment...

We study the effect of size differences for an optimal risk sharing system of intergovernmental transfers in Germany. The German fiscal transfer system should account for the fact that an optimal insurance mechanism has the property that smaller states contribute a smaller share of their tax...

We study the random assignment of indivisible objects among a set of agents with strict preferences. We show that there exists no mechanism which is unanimous, strategy-proof and envy-free. Weakening the first requirement to q-unanimity - i.e., when every agent ranks a different object at the...