Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We introduce human traders into an agent based financial market simulation prone to bubbles and crashes. We find that human traders earn lower profits overall than do the simulated agents (robots) but earn higher profits in the most crash-intensive periods. Inexperienced human traders tend to...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries - Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly...

People's desire for fair transactions can play an important role in negotiations, organizations, and markets. In this paper, we show that markets can also shape what people consider to be a fair transaction. We propose a simple and generally-applicable model of path-dependent fairness...

We analyze results from two categories of experiments where the subjects received controlled signals about the sex of their co-players. In a series of Battle of the Sexes experiments the subjects played more hawkish against women than against men. The impact of the sex signal was most pronounced...

This paper presents the results from an ethnical discrimination experiment that was conducted in one of Sweden's most "problematic" cities with respect to the integration process of refugees. The subjects confronted three different bargaining games; one trust game, one social exclusion and...

The paper reports the first experimental study on people's fairness views on extreme income inequalities arising from winner-take-all reward structures. We find that the majority of participants consider extreme income inequality generated in winner-take-all situations as fair, independent of...

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...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

In this paper we present the results of an experiment aimed at testing the ability of consumers to coordinate actions in a market in which network externalities are present. Such markets are characterized by the necessity for consumers to believe that a certain minimum number of people will buy...