The psychology literature provides ample evidence that people have difficulties taking the perspective of less informed others. This paper presents a controlled experiment showing that this "curse of knowledge" can cause comparative overconfidence and overentry into competition. In a broader...

A frequent feature of information structures is that they generate signals which are not mutually independent, but rather rely on a common set of underlying information. Using a simple experimental design, we show that in such contexts many people neglect correlations in the updating process,...

We present the results of an experiment that measures social preferences within couples in a context where intra-household pay-off inequality can be reduced at the cost of diminishing household income. We measure social norms regarding this efficiency-equality trade-off and implement a...

Public goods provision often involves groups of contributors repeatedly interacting with administrators who can extract rents from the pool of contributions. We suggest a novel identification approach that exploits the sequential ordering of decisions in a panel vector autoregressive model to...

Transparency and accountability are often regarded as crucial for good governance and the efficient organization of public affairs. To systematically explore the impact of transparency and accountability on cooperation, we conduct a series of laboratory experiments on a variation of the public...

An emerging economic literature has found evidence that wellbeing follows a U-shape over age. Some theories have assumed that the U-shape is caused by unmet expectations that are felt painfully in midlife but beneficially abandoned and experienced with less regret during old age. In a unique...

This paper investigates whether information complementarities can explain the strong patterns of sectoral comovement observed empirically. It tests the theoretical model by Veldkamp and Wolfers (2007), which suggests that firms' output decisions are based on aggregate information rather than...

This paper provides a two-part empirical analysis on how actuarial reduction rates for early retirement affect current pension payments in Germany and to what extent the existence and the magnitude of these reduction rates influence people s retirement planning. First, by evaluating a large...

The design and analysis of optimal monetary policy is usually guided by the paradigm of homogeneous rational expectations. Instead, we examine the dynamic consequences of implementation strategies, when the actual economy features expectational heterogeneity. Agents have either rational or...

In this paper we explore the degree of anchoring of inflation expectations of consumers by analysing the comovement in short- and long-run expectations. If inflation expectations are firmly anchored, a transitory shock should influence the short-run inflation expectations but not effect long-run...