This paper examines experimentally two common conjectures in the popular literature on financial markets: that they are swayed by emotion and that they behave like a 'crowd'. We find consistent evidence that deviations of prices from fundamental value depend on the emotion of excitement and on...

The underlying motivations for envy or related social preferences and their impact on agricultural innovations are examined by combining data from money burning experimental game and household survey from Ethiopia. In the first stage of the money burning experimental game, income inequality is...

We incorporate inferential expectations into the Barro-Gordon model (1983a) of time inconsistency and consider reputational equilibria. The range of sustainable equilibria shrinks as the private sector becomes more belief-conservative.

Appointing public officials is an important feature of modern democracies. Citizens are periodically asked to select amongst different candidates whom they want to appoint as public officials in central or local governments. There may be a trade-off on the extent to which candidates are seen as...

We present an experiment investigating the effects of having an individual identified as a singleton group. The presence of a singleton group reduces trustworthiness. The majority group members discriminate against the singled out group member when they are not responsible of the distinct status...

A relevance, distinctiveness and plausibility (RDP) analysis is a conceptual framework that can be used to identify when potential confounds are a problem for interpreting experimental results. We illustrate this analysis using the creation or enhancement of natural group identity by the means...

Public good contribution in experiments may at least partially be driven by the social demand to contribute that is implicit in them. We consider a questionnaire measure and build a behavioural measure of sensitivity to social pressure based on paired dictator and money burning games; we find...

This paper studies the relevance of equilibrium and nonequilibrium explanations of behavior, with respects to equilibrium refinement, as players gain experience. We investigate this experimentally using an incomplete information sequential move game with heterogeneous preferences and multiple...

Behaviour in public good experiments is usually attributed partly to rational self-interest and partly to social norms and preferences. This paper examines if sensitivity to social desirability affects public good contribution and in what way. A pre-experimental measure of social desirability...

Do the insights into human behavior generated by laboratory experiments hold outside the lab? This is the crucial question of external validity that naturally troubles both experimentalists and their critics. We address this question by adopting Popper's injunction that hypotheses should be...