Although theories in both evolutionary biology and economics predict that an individual’s health should be associated with the individual’s time preference, no prior study has been done to empirically support or refute such predictions. By collecting detailed measures of health, time...

Previous work in experimental economics reveals specific differences in economic behavior, especially reciprocity and free-riding behavior, across cultures. We expand the possible pallet of cross-cultural behavioral differences that may exist. We hypothesize that different kinds of strategic...

This dissertation, which consists of three essays, studies online auctions boththeoretically and empirically.The first essay studies a special online auction format used by eBay, “Buy-It-Now” (BIN) auctions, in which bidders are allowed to buy the item at a fixed BINprice set by the seller...

This thesis contains four essays which are all from the broader field of insurance economics. The chapters can be read independently, although there is a certain connection between the articles. Chapter 2, which deals with moral hazard, and chapter 3, which is on oligopolistic models in the...

Keizer, Lindenberg and Steg (2008) conduct six interesting field experiments and report that their results provide evidence of the broken windows theory. Such an analysis is highly relevant as the (broken windows) theory is both controversial and lacking empirical support. Keizer et al.’s key...

We explore the role of reciprocity in wage determination by combining experimentaland survey data. The experiment is similar to Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe's (1995) and is conducted with Ghanaian manufacturing workers. The survey relates to the same sample workers and the firms within which they...

Informal lending and savings institutions exist around the world, and often include regular door-to-door deposit collection of cash. Some banks have adopted similar services in order to expand access to banking services in areas that lack physical branches. Using a randomized control trial, we...

Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the empirical importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major South...

We compare the ability of three preference elicitation methods (hypothetical choices, non-hypothetical choices, and non-hypothetical rankings) and three discrete-choice econometric models (the multinomial logit, the independent availability logit, and the random parameter logit) to predict...

En este trabajo se lleva a cabo un experimento a gran escala para evaluar causalmente si existe discriminación de género en los precios de las reparaciones de automóviles en Estados Unidos. Las mujeres reciben presupuestos un 2 por ciento (10 dólares) mayores que los que reciben los hombres....