Consumers can accumulate product information on the basis of a combination of searching, product advertising and expert advice. Examples of experts who provide product information include doctors advising patients on treatments, motor mechanics diagnosing car problems and recommending repairs,...

Self regulation (SR) is a common way of enforcing quality in markets (such as banking, financial services and several professions) and in a variety of public and private organizations. We provide experimental evidence of the reputational incentives of Self Regulatory Organizations (SROs) to...

Immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variations across US states for the period 1970 to 2005, we quantify the impact of immigrants on intermediate goods...

This paper focuses on the 2004 enlargement of the European Union to the East and treats it as a natural experiment to investigate two issues: first, whether there has been a trade creation effect in final and intermediate goods and second, to what extent this effect has been more pronounced for...

Three results emerge from a simple experiment on imitation. First, I find behavior which strongly suggests an intention to imitate. Second, players imitate successful other players rather than repeating successful actions. Third, to find imitation examples, players use several periods of memory....

This paper purports to provide experimental evidence explaining a number of stylized facts associated with thebehaviour of financial returns, in particular, the fat tailed nature of their distribution and the persistence in theirvolatility. By means of a laboratory experiment, we will...

We study the value of information in financial markets by asking whether having more information always leads to higher returns. We address this question in an experiment where single traders have different information levels about an asset’s intrinsic value. In our treatments we vary the...

Bidding challenges learning theories since experiences with the same bid vary stochastically:the same choice can result in either a gain or a loss. In such an environment thequestion arises how the nearly universally documented phenomenon of loss aversion affectsthe adaptive dynamics. We analyze...

When communicating numeric estimates with policymakers, journalists, or the general public, experts must choose between using numbers or natural language. We run two experiments to study whether experts strategically use language to communicate numeric estimates in order to persuade receivers....