The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have to adjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on. This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial. We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...

The population of most developed societies is ‘graying’. As life expectancy increases and thelarge baby-boom generation approaches retirement age, this has critical consequences formaintaining a high standard of living and the sustainability of pension systems. In the light ofthese labor-force...

This paper investigates market failures due to strategic delays. We test experimentally a discrete model of dynamic investment, where two privately informed agents have an option to invest at the time of their choice in the presence of waiting costs. The equilibrium outcome of ourexperimental...

Experimental research on decision making under risk has until now always employed choicedata in order to evaluate the empirical performance of expected utility and the alternative nonexpectedutility theories. The present paper performs a similar analysis which relies on pricingdata instead of...

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 report on an experiment designed to explore the interrelation of otherregardingconcerns with attitudes towards risk and delay when the latterhave a social dimension, i.e., pertain to one's own and another person'spayos. For this sake, we compare evaluations of several prospects, eachof which...

Conventions can be narrowly interpreted as coordinated ways of equilibriumplay, i.e., a specific convention tells all players in a game withmultiple strict equilibria which equilibrium to play. In our view, coordinationoften takes place before learning about the games. Thus, one hasto coordinate...

To explain why pre-play communication increases cooperation in games,one refers to a) strategic causes such as efficient communication or reputationeffects, and b) changes in the utilities due to social processes. Hithertoexperimental support for both explanations is mixed and confounded....

Myopic loss aversion (MLA) has been established as one prominentexplanation for the equity premium puzzle. In this paper we address two issuesrelated to the effects of MLA on risky investment decisions. First, we assess therelative impact of feedback frequency and investment flexibility (via...

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...