Contests are well-established mechanisms for political lobbying, innovation, rentseeking, incentivizing workers, and advancing R&D. A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases investments of contestants because of the "discouragement effect."...

Many papers have reported behavioral biases in belief formation that come on top of standard game-theoretic reasoning. We show that the processes involved depend on the way participants reason about their beliefs. When they think about what everybody else or another "unspeci fied" individual is...

We investigate experimentally on eBay how sellers set prices in "Buy-It-Now" (BIN) auctions. We find that the eBay format leads to prices substantially below those expected in second-price auctions. Moreover, our results reveal that the information available on eBay about buyer experience and...

We use an experiment to test the hypothesis that groups consisting of like-minded cooperators are able to cooperate irrespective of punishment and therefore have a lower demand for a costly punishment institution than groups of like-minded free riders, who are unable to cooperate without...

Belief elicitation is important in many different felds of economic research. We show that how a researcher elicits such beliefs-in particular, whether the belief is about the participant's opponent, an unrelated other, or the population of others-affects the processes involved in the formation...

Online interactions are frequently governed by reputation systems that allow users to evaluate each other after an interaction. Effective reputation systems can increase trust and may improve efficiency in market settings. In recent years, however, fake reviews have become increasingly...

We investigate the presence and stability of dynamically inconsistent time preferences across contexts with and without interpersonal trade-offs. In a longitudinal experiment subjects make a series of intertemporal allocation decisions of real-effort tasks between themselves and another person....

Hypocrisy is the act of claiming moral standards to which one's own behavior does conform. Instances of hypocrisy, such as supposedly green car manufacturer Volkswagen's emissions-related scandal, are frequently reported in the media. In a controlled and incentivized experiment, we find that...

Informed decisions are the cornerstone of a functioning democracy. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, to explore who is good at distinguishing between true and false, and, second, to learn something about mechanisms to debunk false news stories. In an experimental study, subjects were...