In this paper we import a mainstream psycholgical theory, known as attachment theory, into economics and show the implications of this theory for economic behavior by individuals in the ultimatum bargaining game. Attachment theory examines the psychological tendency to seek proximity to another...

This paper introduces an estimator for dynamic macroeconomic models where possibly the dynamics and the variables described therein are incomplete representations of a larger, unknown macroeconomic system. We call this estimator projection minimum distance (PMD) and show that it is consistent...

Many governments subsidize regional rail service as an alternative to road traffic. This paper assesses whether increases in service frequency reduce road traffic externalities. We exploit differences in service frequency growth by procurement mode following a railway reform in Germany to...

In a travel mode choice context, we use survey data to construct and test the significance of five individual specific latent variables - environmental preferences, safety, comfort, convenience and flexibility - postulated to be important for modal choice. Whereas the construction of the safety...

We investigate how the selection process of a leader affects team performance with respect to social learning. We use a lab experiment in which an incentivized guessing task is repeated in a star network with the leader at the center. Leader selection is either based on competence, on...

An important line of recent literature has found gender differences in attitudes toward competition, with men being more likely to choose competitive incentive schemes, even when factors such as ability and risk aversion are controlled for. This paper examines the effect of information on the...

How do people learn? We assess, in a distribution-free manner, subjects' learning and choice rules in dynamic two-armed bandit (probabilistic reversal learning) experiments. To aid in identification and estimation, we use auxiliary measures of subjects' beliefs, in the form of their...

We study the origins of support for gender-related affirmative action (AA) in two pre-registered online experiments (N = 1, 700). Participants act as employers who decide whether to use AA in hiring job candidates. We implement three treatments to disentangle the preference for AA stemming from...

Many studies document failures of expected utility's key assumption, the independence axiom. Here, we show that independence can be decomposed into two distinct axioms - betweenness and homotheticity - and that these two axioms are necessary and sufficient for independence. Thus, independence...