This paper theoretically and experimentally explores a fixed price mechanism inwhich, if aggregate demand exceeds supply, bidders are proportionally rationed. Ifdemand is uncertain, in equilibrium bidders overstate their true demand in order toalleviate the effects of being rationed. This effect...

Thanks to the recent studies of the history and philosophy of experimental economics, it is well known that around the early 1980s, experimental economists made a case for the legitimacy of their laboratory work by emphasizing that it was a nice and indispensable complement to mechanism design...

We propose and experimentally test a mechanism for a class of principal-agent problems in which agents can observe each others' efforts. In this mechanism each player costlessly assigns a share of the pie to each of the other players, after observing their contributions, and the final...

We study default and endogenous leverage in the laboratory. To this purpose, we develop a general equilibrium model of collateralized borrowing amenable to laboratory implementation and gather experimental data. In the model, leverage is endogenous: agents choose how much to borrow using a risky...

The effect of objective feedback on performance is often studied, while subjective feedback is largely neglected in the economics literature. We estimate the impact of positive subjective feedback - encouragement and praise - on effort and performance, and compare the effect by gender. We use a...

To study coordination in complex social systems such as financial markets, the authors introduce a new prediction market set-up that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. Nonetheless, the market is designed so that its total value is known, and thus its rationality can be evaluated. In two...

To study coordination in complex social systems such as financial markets, the authors introduce a new prediction market set -up that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. Nonetheless, the market is designed so that its total value is known, and thus its rationality can be evaluated. In two...

Over two days in February 1988, several key experimental economists and cognitive psychologists met to explore the possibilities of joint research promoted by the Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations under the rubric behavioral economics. The original vision that the meeting could open a line of...

In this paper, we examine labor market favoritism in a unique laboratory experiment design that can shed light on both the private benefits and spillover costs of employer favoritism (or discrimination). Group identity is induced on subjects such that each laboratory "society"consists of eight...

This paper proposes a geometric delineation of distributional preference types and a non-parametric approach for their identification in a two-person context. It starts with a small set of assumptions on preferences and shows that this set (i) naturally results in a taxonomy of distributional...