Despite normative predictions from economics and biology, unrelated strangers will often develop the trust necessary to reap gains from one-shot economic exchange opportunities. This appears to be especially true when declared intentions and emotions can be cheaply communicated. Perhaps even...

We provide an overview of experimental literature on lottery contests and point out the two main phenomena observed in most contest experiments: overbidding relative to the standard Nash equilibrium prediction and heterogeneous behavior of ex-ante symmetric contestants. Based on the sample of...