We propose a model of how social norms change in response to the evolution of privately held preferences. Our aim is to rationalize the tendency for individuals who hold minority preferences to take actions favored by the majority. We do this using a game involving a tension between a desire to...

We design and report on the first laboratory experiment exploring the role of interbank network structure and premature liquidation costs for the likelihood of a financial contagion. The laboratory provides the control necessary to understand the role played by interbank network configurations...

We implement a dynamic asset pricing experiment in the spirit of Lucas (1978) with storable assets and non-storable cash. In the first treatment, we impose diminishing marginal returns to cash to incentivize consumption smoothing across periods. We find that subjects use the asset to smooth...

We explore whether natural human competitiveness can be exploited to stimulate charitable giving in a controlled laboratory experiment involving three different treatments of a sequential dictator game. Without disclosing the actual amounts given and kept, in each period players are publicly...

The paper analyzes dollarization in the sense of asset substitution, where a foreign currency competes with local assets, especially domestic capital, as a store of value, the impact of dollarization on capital accumulation and output, and why economies remain dollarized long after a successful...

We show that extrinsic or non-fundamental uncertainty influences markets in a controlled environment. This work provides the first direct evidence of sunspot equilibria. These equilibria require a common understanding of the semantics of the sunspot variable, and they appear to be sensitive to...

Many internet auction sites implement ascending-bid, second-price auctions. Empirically, last minute or quot;latequot; bidding is frequently observed in quot;hard-closequot; but not in quot;soft-closequot; versions of these auctions. In this paper, we introduce an independent private-value...