This paper addresses a recent criticism of experimental economics, by Levitt and List [2007ab, 2008], that lab experimental findings may not generalize to field settings. We argue against the criticism in three ways. First, experimental economics seeks to establish a general theory linking...

Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. These cold openings provide a natural setting to apply laboratory-developed models of limited strategic thinking to the field. In a set of 1303 widely released movies, cold opening is correlated with a 10-30 percent...

We conduct a study in which subjects trade stocks in an experimental market while we measure their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. All of the subjects trade in a suboptimal way. We use the neural data to test a “realization utility” explanation for their behavior....

We report results from an exploratory study using eye-tracking recording of information acquisition by players in a game theoretic learning paradigm. Eye-tracking is used to observe what information subjects look at in 4x4 normal-form games; the eye-tracking results favor sophisticated learning...

Experimental games turned out to be remarkably productive tools for examining the nature of social preferences and social norms. This paper describes the methods and tools of experimental gametheory and provides a selection of games that have been useful. We also discuss the role of evolutionary...

Experimental games turned out to be remarkably productive tools for examining the nature of social preferences and social norms. This paper describes the methods and tools of experimental gametheory and provides a selection of games that have been useful. We also discuss the role of evolutionary...

Willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) a monetary amount for a lottery should be closely related. In data from an incentivized survey of a representative sample of 3,000 U.S. adults, we find that WTA and WTP for a lottery are, at best, weakly correlated. Across all respondents,...

Financial decisions are among the most important life-shaping decisions that people make. We review facts about financial decisions and what cognitive and neural processes influence them. Because of cognitive constraints and a low average level of financial literacy, many household decisions...

We introduce DOSE - Dynamically Optimized Sequential Experimentation - and use it to estimate individual-level loss aversion in a representative sample of the U.S. population (N = 2;000). DOSE elicitations are more accurate, more stable across time, and faster to administer than standard methods....

We study the pattern of correlations across a large number of behavioral regularities, with the goal of creating an empirical basis for more comprehensive theories of decision-making. We elicit 21 behaviors using an incentivized survey on a representative sample (n = 1;000) of the U.S....