There is evidence that people do not fully take into account how other people’s actions are contingent on these others’ information. This paper defines and applies a new equilibrium concept in games with private information, "cursed equilibrium", which assumes that each player correctly...

Participants in experimental games typically can only choose actions, without making comments about other participants’ future actions. In sequential two-person games, we allow first movers to express a preference between responder choices. We find that responder behavior differs...

Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of "social preferences". We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing...

We develop a model of reference-dependent preferences and loss aversion where "gain-loss utility" is derived from standard "consumption utility" and the reference point is determined endogenously by the economic environment. We assume that a person's reference point is her rational expectations...

Economists often ask how private information is shared through markets, costly signaling, and other mechanisms. Yet most information sharing is done through ordinary, informal talk. Economists are inconsistent in their view of such 'cheap talk': sometimes it is supposed that communication...

Arrow (1971) shows that an expected-utility maximizer with a differentiable utility function will always want to take a sufficiently small stake in any positive-expected-value bet. That is, expected- utility maximizers are arbitrarily close to risk neutral when stakes are arbitrarily small....

It is traditional in experimental games to allow participants to choose only actions or possibly communicate intended play. In sequential two-person games, we require first movers to express a preference between responder choices. We find that responder behavior differs substantially according...

This essay provides a perspective on the trend towards integrating psychology into economics. Some topics are discussed, and arguments are provided for why movement towards greater psychological realism in economics will improve mainstream economics.

Experiments with the ultimatum game -- where one party can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer to a second party on how to split a pie -- illustrate that conventional game theory has been wrong in its predictions regarding the simplest of bargaining settings: Even when one party has enormous...