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 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...

I use game-theoretical models to compare a sender's expected payoff under two methods of wielding influence under incomplete information: offering rewards or threatening punishments. Attempts to influence another's behaviour can have the perverse effect of actually encouraging the behaviour that...

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....

We study theoretically and empirically how monetary incentives and information about others' behavior affects dishonesty. We ran a laboratory experiment with 560 participants inspired by the "observed game" developed by Kajackaite and Gneezy (2017). We find that the extensive (the fraction of...

I present a novel experimental design to measure lying and mistrust as continuous variables on an individual level. My experiment is a sender-receiver game framed as an investment game. It features two players: firstly, an advisor with complete information (i.e., the sender) who is incentivized...

In sequential interactions, both the first mover's intention and the outcome of his choice may influence the second mover's action. While outcomes are typically observable, intentions are more likely to be hidden, leaving potential wiggle room for the second mover when deciding on a...

We develop a model of social preferences for network games and study its predictions in a local public goods game with multiple equilibria. The key feature is that players' social preferences are heterogeneous. This gives room for disagreement between players about the "right" payoff ordering....

Does social identity affect how decision makers consume and digest new information? We study this question through a theoretically informed experiment, employing a variant of the sender receiver game in which receivers can purchase reports from up to two senders. Depending on senders'...