In an experiment, we studied how small groups tackle a company takeover game, a task where participants deciding in isolation frequently exhibit the winner’s curse. We found that groups of three members, who could exchange opinions and chat, substantially reduced the winner's curse and...

In this paper, we adapt the standard political economy models of mixed financing of private goods to allow for an exit option in which individuals can choose to neither consume nor finance the publicly provided private good. Using a controlled laboratory experiment, we empirically investigate...

This paper uses panel data and the Local Linear Kernel Estimator (LLKE) to investigate the effects of aid on economic growth in developing countries. Specifically, we investigate the robustness of a popular parametric specification of the aid/economic growth relationship in Less Developed...

In this paper we examine the net effect of several major tax changes in Australia on residential property prices. Specifically, we consider the announcement and introduction effects that resulted from several policy changes including the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the...

Costless pre-play communication has been found to effectively facilitate coordination and enhance efficiency by increasing individual payoffs in games with Pareto-ranked equilibria. We report an experiment in which two groups compete in a weakest-link contest by expending costly efforts....

Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons” can be overcome when individuals share their output equally in groups of optimal size and there is no communication. The assignment of individuals to groups as either strangers or partners does not significantly affect this...

What is the effect of the fear of future sovereign default on the economy of the defaulting country? The typical sovereign default model does not address this question. In this paper we wish to explore the possibility that changing expectations about future default themselves can lead to...

We consider a model where multiple principals repeatedly offer short-term contracts to three or more agents with private information. Under low discounting there exists a simple class of mechanisms that sustains all equilibrium allocations that could be generated by arbitrarily complex...

We propose a new technique for the estimation of multidimensional evaluation functions. Technical advances allow nonparametric inference on the joint distribution of continuous and discrete indicators of well-being, such as income and health, conditional on joint values of other continuous and...

This paper studies asymmetric first-price menu auctions in the procurement environment where the buyer does not commit to a decision rule and asymmetric sellers have interdependent costs and statistically affiliated signals. Sellers compete in bidding a menu of contracts, where a contract...