Major bubble episodes are rare events. In this paper, we examine what factors might cause some asset price bubbles to become very large. We recreate, in a laboratory setting, some of the specific institutional features investors in the South Sea Company faced in 1720. Several factors have been...

Experiments in which subjects play simultaneously several finite prisoner's dilemma supergames with and without an outside option reveal that: (i) subjects use probabilistic start and endeffect behaviour, (ii) the freedom to choose whether to play the prisoner's dilemma game enhances...

Are poor people more or less likely to take money risks than wealthy folks? We find that risk attraction is more prevalent among the wealthy when the amounts of money at risk are small (not surprising, since ten dollars is a smaller amount for a wealthy person than for a poor one), but,...

We use subjects’ actions in modified dictator games to perform a within-subject classification of individuals into four different types of interdependent preferences: Selfish, Social Welfare maximizers, Inequity Averse and Competitive. We elicit beliefs about other subjects’ actions in the...

We examine the effect of unilateral and mutual partner selection in the context of prisoner's dilemmas experimentally. Subjects play simultaneously several finitely repeated two-person prisoner's dilemma games. We find that unilateral choice is the best system. It leads to low defection and...

We perform an experimental test of Maskin's canonical mechanism for Nash implementation, using 3 subjects in non-repeated groups, as well as 3 outcomes, states of nature, and integer choices. We find that this mechanism succesfully implements the desired outcome a large majority of the time and...

In an experiment we study market outcomes under alternative incentive structures for third-party enforcers. Our transactions resemble an anonymous credit market where lenders can give loans and borrowers can repay them. When borrowers default, judges are free to enforce repayment but are...

We study an interactive framework that explicitly allows for non-rational behavior. We do not place any restrictions on how players can deviate from rational behavior. Instead we assume that there exists a lower bound p E [0,1] such that all players play and are believed to play rationally with...

We test in the laboratory the potential of evolutionary dynamics as predictor of actual behavior. To this end, we propose an asymmetric game -which we interpret as a borrowerlender relation-, study its evolutionary dynamics in a random matching set-up, and tests its predictions. The model...

Kahneman and Tversky asserted a fundamental asymmetry between gains and losses, namely a “reflection effect” which occurs when an individual prefers a sure gain of $ pz to an uncertain gain of $ z with probability p, while preferring an uncertain loss of $z with probability p to a certain...