In a recent paper Konrad and Thum (2014) present a model that shows that unilateral pre-commitment reduces the likelihood of agreement in bilateral negotiations over the provision of a public good when parties have private information over their contribution costs. We test the model in a...

This paper uses an experimental design of voluntary information acquisition to assess the information assumptions of different learning models. The design is implemented in two-stage asymmetric-information games. Subjects' information-seeking behavior reveals that they tend to choose certain...

Film distributors occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. Cold openings provide a natural field setting to test models of limited strategic thinking. In a set of 856 widely released movies, cold opening produces a significant 15% increase in domestic box office revenue...

This paper deals with the effects of different modes of communication in a costless information transmission environment with multiple senders. To this aim, we present a theoretical and experimental study of three Cheap Talk games, each having two senders and one receiver. The communication of...

Existing theoretical and experimental studies have established that unanimity is a poor decision rule for promoting information aggregation. Despite this, unanimity is frequently used in committees making decisions on behalf of society. This paper shows that when committee members are exposed to...

Recent literature has shown that lying behavior in the laboratory can well be explained by a combination of lying costs and reputation concerns. We extend the literature on lying behavior to strategic interactions. As reciprocal behavior is important in many interactions, we study a theoretical...

This article studies whether people want to control which information on their own past pro-social behavior is revealed to other people. Participants in an experiment are assigned a color which depends on their own past pro-sociality. They can then spend money to increase or decrease the...

The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one pushing towards telling always the truth and the other pushing towards helping others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What...

In a recent paper Konrad and Thum (2014) present a model that shows that unilateral pre-commitment reduces the likelihood of agreement in bilateral negotiations over the provision of a public good when parties have private information over their contribution costs. We test the model in a...

We study the voluntary revelation of private information in a labor-market experiment where workers can reveal their productivity at a cost. While rational revelation improves a worker's payoff, it imposes a negative externality on others and may trigger further revelation. Such unraveling can...