Do participants bring their own priors to an experiment? If so, do they share the same priors as the researchers who design the experiment? In this article, we examine the extent to which self-generated priors conform to experimenters’ expectations by explicitly asking participants to indicate...

One of the most intriguing questions in insurance is the preference of consumers for low or zero deductible insurance policies. This stands in sharp contrast to a theorem proved by Mossin, 1968, that under quite common assumptions when the price of insurance is higher than its actuarial value,...

We find a herding tendency among both amateur and professional investors and conclude that the propensity to herd is lower in the professionals. These results are obtained both when we consider herding into individual stocks and herding into stocks in general. Herding depends on the firm’s...

This paper investigates the effect of compensation of corporate personnel on their investment in new technologies. We focus on a specific corporate activity, namely corporate venture capital (CVC), describing minority equity investment by established-firms in entrepreneurial ventures. The...

Performance sampling models of duration dependence in employee turnover and firm exit predict that hazard rates will initially be low, gradually rise to a maximum, and then fall. As we note in this paper, however, several empirical duration distributions have bimodal hazard rates. This paper...

Behavior in competitive situations requires decision makers to evaluate their own as well as their competitors’ positions. Using data from a realistic competitive risk-taking setting, Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions (TOC), we test whether players choose the strategic best response when...

Behavior in dynamic competitive situations requires decision makers to evaluate their own as well as their competitors’ positions. This paper uses data from a realistic competitive risk taking setting, Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions, to test whether individual players choose the...

Explaining human cooperation in large groups of non-kin is a major challenge to both rational choice theory and the theory of evolution. Recent research suggests that group cooperation can be explained assuming that cooperators can punish non-cooperators or cheaters. The experimental evidence...

To answer the question in the title we vary agents' beliefs against the background of a fixed knowledge space, that is, a state space with a partition for each agent. Beliefs are the posterior probabilities of agents, which we call type profiles. We then ask what is the topological size of the...