This paper examines the concern for relative standing among rural households in China. We use a survey-experimental method to measure to what extent poor Chinese farmers care about their relative income and find that the respondents care to a high degree. Compared to previous studies in...

I consider a gamble where the sum of the distributed payoffs is proportionate to the number of participants. I show that no subset of the population can agree to participate in the bet, if the size of the group is commonly known. Repeated announcements of the number of the participants leads the...

Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents. Examples of mimicry range from the choice of restaurant, fash-ion and financial market...

One potential reason for bubbles evolving prior to the financial crisis was excessive risk taking stemming from option-like incentive schemes in financial institutions. By running laboratory asset markets, we investigate the impact of option-like incentives on price formation and trading...

This classroom experiment introduces students to the notion of credit risk by allowing them to trade on comparable corporate bond issues from two types of markets - investment-grade and high-yield. Investment-grade issues have a lower probability of default than high-yield issues, and thus...

Overconfidence can have important economic consequences, but has received little direct testing within the discipline. We test for overconfidence in forecasts of own absolute or relative performance in two unfamiliar experimental tasks. Given their choice of effort at the tasks, participants...

In a split sample design, we examine how the number of choice sets, design of the first choice set (starting point), and the choice of attribute levels in the cost attribute affect the precision in the elicited preferences in otherwise completely identical choice experiment surveys. These issues...

We conduct a field experiment to analyze the effect of deadline length on charitable giving. Subjects are invited to complete an online survey, with a donation going to charity if they do so. Participants are given either one week, one month or no deadline by which to respond. Donations are...

We use a natural field experiment to investigate the hypothesis that generosity is partly involuntary, by examining whether individuals tend to avoid opportunities to act generously. In Sweden, new recycling machines for bottles and cans with an option of donating the returned deposit to charity...

We examine whether and to what extent joint choices are more or less patient and time-consistent than individual choices in households. We use data from an artefactual field experiment where both individual and joint time preferences were elicited. We find a substantial shift from individual to...