This paper reports an experiment evaluating the effect of gift giving on building trust in a relationship. We have nested our explorations in the standard version of the investment game. Our gift treatment includes a dictator stage in which the trustee decides whether to give a gift to the...

Considered here is decentralized exchange of privately owned commodity bundles. Voluntary transactions take the form of repeated bilateral barters. Under broad and reasonable hypotheses the resulting process converges to comepetitive equilibrium. Price-taking behavior is not assumed. Prices...

We explore the effect of income inequality and peer punishment on voluntary provision of public goods in an experimental context. Our sample draws from nine fishing communities in South-Africa where high levels of inequality prevail. We find that aggregate cooperation is higher in both the...

Kirchler et al. (2012) make a number of contributions to experimental research on asset markets. One of their findings is that the levels of cash holdings of traders do not affect asset prices when fundamentals follow a constant time trajectory. We report a new experiment in which we replicate...

We report the results of an experiment designed to study the effect of asset-holdings caps on the formation of bubbles and crashes in laboratory asset markets. Bubbles and crashes are a quite robust phenomenon in experimental settings. Motivated by concentration control policies employed in the...

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...

Using quasi-experimental data, this paper examines the relationship between religiosity and prosocial behavior. In contrast to previous studies which identify religious people by how often they attend religious services or by their self-reported religiosity, this study compares the behavior of...

Although conventional economic theory proposes that only the absolute levels of income and consumption matter for people’s utility, there is much evidence that relative concerns are often important. This paper uses a survey-experimental method to measure people’s perceptions of the degree to...

We test the hypothesis that people conform to certain social norms, i.e. that some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society. To investigate consumer preferences for environmentally friendly products, we...

We show that peer sanctioning increases cooperation in public goods experiments more in unequally endowed groups than in equally endowed groups. Punishment results in a redistribution of wealth from high to low endowment players within groups. <p>