Evidence increasingly points to the importance of reference-dependence in predicting consumer behavior. We utilize detailed data from penny auctions, which first appeared as an internet phenomenon in the late 2000's, to uncover how consumers' prior experiences predict their willingness to try a...

How does an individual's position within a social distribution influence their desire to take risk? Reference-dependent loss aversion (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Koszegi and Rabin, 2006, 2007) adapted to a social setting, suggests that individuals may find risk more appealing when they are doing...

How does an individual’s position within a social distribution influence their desire to take risk? Reference-dependent loss aversion (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Koszegi and Rabin, 2006, 2007) adapted to a social distribution setting, suggests that individuals could find risk more appealing at...

Although contests are recognized theoretically as a highly effective method of motivation, the competitive nature of contests may generate unintended negative effects on social interactions in more general settings beyond contests. Using a laboratory experiment of real effort tasks with...

Frequent online poker players with extensive experience calculating probabilities and expected values might be expected to behave as Expected Utility maximizers, in that small shocks to their wealth would not affect risk preferences (Rabin, 2000). By contrast, reference-dependent loss aversion...

We study the incentives of players to disclose information on their private valuations of the prize ahead of a rent-seeking contest. We show that information sharing can arise in equilibrium if types are concentrated enough, whereas sharing information is strictly dominated if types are...

We study the optimal information disclosure policy in a two-player all-pay auction contest with one-sided asymmetric information in both simultaneous move setup and sequential move setup. The designer can pre-commit to a signal device that generates a type-dependent distribution, signaling the...

We generalize Klumpp, Konrad and Solomon’s model (KKS Model) to multi-contestant sequential Colonel Blotto Games with prize functions where any contestant’s prizes only depend on this contestant’s own number of winning rounds. We show that with weakly monotonic prize functions and CSFs...