This paper reports results from a series of laboratory experiments designed to evaluate the impact of exposure risk on market performance. Exposure risk arises when there are complementarities between trades, e.g. when the purchase of a new house requires selling the old one. The continuous...

We use laboratory experiments to test for one of the foundations of the rational voter paradigm - that voters respond to probabilities of being pivotal. We exploit a setup that entails stark theoretical effects of information concerning the preference distribution (as revealed through polls) on...

Traders' values and information typically consist of both private and common-value elements. In such environments, full allocative efficiency is impossible when the private rate of information substitution differs from the social rate (Jehiel and Moldovanu, 2001). We link this impossibility...

Charness and Dufwenberg (American Economic Review, June 2011, 1211-1237) have recently demonstrated that cheap-talk communication raises efficiency in bilateral contracting situations with adverse selection. We replicate their finding and check its robustness by introducing competition between...

We employ laboratory methods to study stability of competitive equilibrium in Scarf's economy (International Economic Review, 1960). Tatonnement theory predicts that prices are globally unstable for this economy, i.e. unless prices start at the competitive equilibrium they oscillate without...

An important result in convex analysis is the duality between a closed convex set and its support function. We exploit this duality to develop a novel geometric approach to mechanism design. For a general class of social choice problems we characterize the feasible set, which is closed and...

We consider a standard social choice environment with linear utilities and independent, one-dimensional, private values. We provide a short and constructive proof that for any Bayesian incentive compatible mechanism there exists an equivalent dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanism that...

Motivated by a popular perception that Roth accounts are welfare-improving for most people, this paper compares the effects of mandated Traditional (tax-deferred) or Roth (taxprepaid) retirement policies in a controlled laboratory setting. Selection effects, which complicate analyses of...