"An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world Incentives send powerful signals that aim to influence behavior. But often there is a conflict between what we say...

The classical price competition model (named after Bertrand), prescribes that in equilibrium prices are equal to marginal costs. Moreover, prices do not depend on the number of competitors. Since this outcome is not in line with real-life observations, it is known as the Bertrand Paradox. Many...

We present a field study of social learning. The setting is a pair of adjacent fast food restaurants serving very similar cuisine whose main clientele are the students at a nearby major university. We observed whether an uninformed customer's choice of restaurant depends on the relative queue...

The authors use a labor supply; relative pay; experimental economics laboratory experiment to examine the impact of relative wages on labor supply. They test the hypothesis that, ceteris paribus, making a given wage high (low) relative to other wage levels will lead to an increase (decrease) in...

This study investigates how information on solicitors' compensation affects charitable giving in a door-to-door field experiment with more than 2,800 households. We vary whether solicitors are paid or not and the information about this compensation that potential donors receive. Relative to the...

We report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing whether incentivizing physical exercise improves the academic performance of college students. As expected, the intervention increases physical activity. The main result is that it generates a strong and significant improvement in...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of optimal learning in repeated coordination games. We find evidence for such learning when we limit both the cognitive demands on players and the information available to them. We also find that uniqueness of the optimal strategy is no guarantee...

Social norms permeate society across a wide range of issues and are important to understanding how societies function. In this paper we concentrate on 'bad' social norms - those that are inefficient or even damaging to a group. This paper explains how bad social norms evolve and persist; our...