A contest is a situation in which individuals or groups expend costly resources while competing to win a specific prize. The variety of economic situations that can be described as contests has attracted enormous attention from economic theorists. Despite the extensive theoretical research of...

This thesis includes three essays that examine the impact on network externalities (demand side economies of scale) on agent behaviour in markets. Essays 2 and 3 use experimental methodology to test predictions from theory. The fourth essay analyses field data collected from a specific market...

This paper reports a preliminary laboratory experiment in which traders make investments to increase the reliability of tradable instruments that represent greenhouse gas emissions allowances. In one half of the sessions these investments are unobservable, while in the other half traders can...

This thesis examines three unrelated market-based policies. The first topic is the "green marketing" phenomenon, whereby producers attempt to differentiate their products based on environmental quality. "Buying green" has two main beneficial components: the benefit accruing to the individual...

This paper reports an asset market experiment in which asymmetrically informed traders transact through competing dealers. Dealers face a classic adverse selection problem, because some traders have private information regarding the asset value while other traders are uninformed. When dealers...

Tradable emissions permits have been implemented to control pollution levels in various markets around the world and represent a major component of legislative efforts to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States. Because permits are supplied for a fixed level of pollution,...

This paper presents a laboratory experiment to investigate how social motivations and free-form communication (Rich Communication) can facilitate coordinated resistance against divide-and-conquer transgressions. In our experiment, a leader first decides whether to extract surplus from a victim...

Agglomeration Bonus (AB) schemes reward private landowners to spatially coordinate land use decisions to enhance the supply of ecosystem services. The AB mechanism creates a coordination game with multiple Pareto ranked Nash equilibria, which correspond to different spatially-coordinated land...