We test the turnout predictions of the standard two-party, private value, costly voting model through a large-scale, real effort experiment. We do this by recruiting 1,200 participants through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and employing a 2 x 2 between subjects design encompassing small (N=30) and...

In a 1-year randomized controlled trial involving thousands of university students, we provide real-time private feedback on relative performance in a semester-long online assignment. Within this setup, our experimental design cleanly identifies the behavioral response to rank incentives (i.e.,...

We propose a new game theoretic approach to modeling large elections that overcomes the "paradox of voting" in a costly voting framework, without reliance on the assumption of ad hoc preferences for voting. The key innovation that we propose is the adoption of a "smooth" policy rule under which...

This paper provides a direct test of the hypothesis that agents' objective functions are non-separable in economic incentives and social preferences. We study experimentally fixed-prize contests using a 2x2 design, varying orthogonally the degree of competition of the incentive mechanism...

We conduct a field experiment on conflict in swimming pools. When all lanes are occupied, an actor joins the least crowded lane and asks one of the swimmers to move to another lane. The lane represents a contested scarce resource. We vary the actor’s valuation (high and low) for the good...