Antitrust authorities all over the world are concerned if a particularly aggressive competitor, a maverick, is bought out of the market. One plausible determinant of acting as a maverick is behavioral: the maverick derives utility from acting competitively. We test this conjecture in the lab. In...

We study a classic mechanism design problem: How to organize trade between two privately informed parties. We characterize an optimal mechanism under selfish preferences and present experimental evidence that, under such a mechanism, a non-negligible fraction of individuals deviates from the...

We study experimentally when, why, and how people intervene in others’ choices. Choice Architects (CAs) construct opportunity sets containing bundles of time-indexed payments for Choosers. CAs frequently prevent impatient choices despite opportunities to provide advice, believing Choosers...

Who participates in transactions when information about the consequences must be learned? We show theoretically that decision makers for whom acquiring and processing information is more costly respond more strongly to changes in incentive payments for participating and decide to participate...

We study the interplay of inequality and trust in a dynamic game, in which trust increases efficiency and thus allows higher growth of the experimental economy in the future. We find that trust is initially high in a treatment starting with equal endowments, but decreases over time. In a...

No abstract available

We conducted a controlled field experiment on eBay and examined to what extent both social and competitive laboratory behavior is robust to institutionally complex real world markets with experienced traders, who selected themselves into these markets. EBay's natural trading system provides...

Many Internet markets rely on feedback systems', essentially social networks of reputation, to facilitate trust and trustworthiness in anonymous transactions. Market competition creates incentives that arguably may enhance or curb the effectiveness of these systems. We investigate how different...