Many social dilemmas exhibit nonlinearities and equilibrium outcomes in the interior of the choice space. This paper reports a laboratory experiment studying whether peer punishment promotes socially efficient behavior in such environments, which have been ignored in most experimental studies of...

Evidence shows that real-effort investments can affect bilateral bargaining outcomes. This paper investigates whether similar investments can inhibit equilibrium convergence of experimental markets. In one treatment, sellers’ relative effort affects the allocation of production costs, but a...

History-dependent strategies are often used to support cooperation in repeated game models. Using the indefinitely repeated common-pool resource assignment game and a perfect stranger experimental design, this paper reports novel evidence that players who have successfully used an...

This note introduces a model of contests with random noise and a shared prize that combines features of Tullock (1980) and Lazear and Rosen (1981). Similar to results in Lazear and Rosen, as the level of noise decreases the equilibrium effort rises. As the noise variance approaches zero, the...

Motivated by problems of coordination failure observed in weak-link games, we experimentally investigate behavioral spillovers for minimum- and median-effort coordination games. Subjects play these coordination games simultaneously and sequentially. The results show that successful coordination...

Costless pre-play communication has been found to effectively facilitate coordination and enhance efficiency in games with Pareto-ranked equilibria. We report an experiment in which two groups compete in a weakest-link contest by expending costly efforts. Allowing intra-group communication leads...

This experiment compares the performance of two contest designs: a standard winner-take-all tournament with a single fixed prize, and a novel proportional-payment design in which that same prize is divided among contestants by their share of total achievement. We find that proportional prizes...

In our laboratory customer markets, sellers post price and buyers incur cost (controlled at zero, low and high values) when they switch to a new seller. Sellers' production costs follow various random walks in 28 sessions, each with 50-100 trading periods. We find that prices are sticky, and...