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...

We study a hierarchical Bayesian persuasion game with a sender, a receiver, and several potential intermediaries, generalizing the framework of Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011). The sender must be persuasive through a hierarchy of intermediaries to reach the final receiver, whose action affects all...

When interacting with others, individuals are often known to adjust their behavior based on the gender characteristics of the other person. Information about another person’s gender tends to influence both behavior towards that individual, as well as expectations about that individual’s...

We investigate the relative merits of the Boston and Serial Dictatorship mechanisms when the timing of students' preference submission over schools varies within the structure of the mechanism. Despite the well-documented disadvantages of the Boston mechanism (Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez, 2003),...

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...

We propose a simple commitment mechanism prior to a public goods contribution game. Each player simultaneously and independently proposes a deduction rate, which serves as a proposal for the rate by which the return on private investment accounts will be reduced. The group deduction rate is...