Theories of fairness have typically used the assumption of ex-ante known pie size. Pie size, however, is rarely known ex ante. Using three simple allocation problems generally known as dictator, ultimatum and trust games, we explore the influence of ex-ante unknown pie size of varying degrees of...

We investigate the decisions of individuals in simple and complex environments. We use a version of the Guessing Game (Beauty-contest Game) as a vehicle for our investigation, employing mathematically talented students. We find that our subjects think in complex environments more carefully...

We experimentally study the effects of introducing a forward market and of increasing the number of competitors in a quantity-setting market under strictly convex production costs. Our key interest is to better understand which of these two remedies is more effective at enhancing competition....

Analyzing the rhetorical structure of The Wealth of Nations (Smith WN) and its context, we make the case for the central importance of its Book V, "Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth”, which tends to be neglected in most accounts of Smith’s oeuvre (even, most recently,...

We discuss ways to cope with uneven expected lab earnings that are the likely results of role assignments. We identify three problems associated with uneven earnings in the lab: of social preferences, of low marginal return for effort, and of perceived deception. Mining the opinions of...

: We report the results of two laboratory experiments that study how university student and staff participants chose retirement savings investment options using ‘user-friendly’ information prescribed by regulators. We demonstrate that choices of more than 20% of participants cannot be...

The literature on dictator [D] and joy-of-destruction [JoD] games demonstrates that people can be nice and nasty. We study, by way of an experiment with between-subjects and within-subjects features, to what extent behaviors are context dependent and consistent. We find that, for one-shot D and...

Self-regulatory organizations (SROs) can be found in education, healthcare, and other not-for-profit sectors as well as the accounting, financial, and legal professions. DeMarzo et al. (2005) show theoretically that SROs can create monopoly market power for their affiliated agents, but that...

Tournaments of heterogeneous candidates can be thought of as probabilistic mechanisms that select high-quality agents. We quantify the efficiency of such selection by the likelihood of selecting the best player, here termed the "predictive power." We study three widely used tournament formats:...