We analyze experimental evidence on whether untrained subjects can predict how trustworthy an individual is. Two players on a TV show play a high stakes prisoner's dilemma with pre-play communication. Our subjects report probabilistic beliefs that each player cooperates, before and after...

We study experimentally if lying is persistent. In a strategic game, we manipulate the incentives to lie to others. Some participants are first exposed to high incentives and then lower incentives; for others the reverse. We conjectured that participants will lie more often when the incentives...

We analyze a large stakes prisoner's dilemma game played on a TV show. Players cooperate 40% of the time, demonstrating that social preferences are important; however, cooperation is significantly below the 50% threshold that is required for inequity aversion to sustain cooperation. Women...

This study presents evidence from a field experiment on the prevalence of favoritism among children. Children compete in groups in a tournament in a real effort experiment with two rounds. The children report which group member they prefer to do the task in the second round, providing them with...

We study dynamic moral hazard where principal and agent are symmetrically uncertain about job difficulty. Since effort is unobserved, shirking leads the principal to believe that the job is hard, increasing the agent's continuation value. So deterring shirking requires steeper incentives, which...

We study dynamic moral hazard, with symmetric ex ante uncertainty and learning. Unlike Holmstrom's career concerns model, uncertainty pertains to the difficulty of the job rather than the general talent of the agent, so that contracts are required to provide incentives. Since effort is privately...

We examine buyer strategic power in the model of dynamic Bertrand-Edgeworth competition. Two sellers with a limited inventory sell to a single buyer, who has a consumption opportunity in each period. The market power of the sellers is offset by the strategic power of the buyer. By not consuming...

We consider a society where parents prefer boys to girls, but also value grandchildren. Parental sex selection results in a biased sex ratio that is socially inefficient, due to a congestion externality in the marriage market. Improvements in selection techniques aggravate the inefficiency....

Using the US Commissioner of Labor Survey of 1890, we examine household decisions and parental altruism vis-a-vis their children. Contrary to Parsons and Goldin (1989), we find that parental location choices were dictated by constraints rather than the desire to exploit child labour...

We study the incentives of parents to invest in their children when these investments improve their marriage prospects, in a frictionless marriage market with non-transferable utility. Stochastic returns to investment eliminate the multiplicity of equilibria that plagues models with...