Do participants bring their own priors to an experiment? If so, do they share the same priors as the researchers who design the experiment? In this article, we examine the extent to which self-generated priors conform to experimenters’ expectations by explicitly asking participants to indicate...

Since its inception, psychology has studied position effects. But the position was a temporal one in sequential presentation, and the dependent variables related to memory and learning. This paper attempts to survey position effects when position is spatial (namely, position=location), all...

A stranger entering the store ahead of you may hold the door open so it does not slam in your face, or your daughter may tidy up the kitchen when she realizes that you are very tired: both act out of considerateness. In acting considerately one takes others into consideration. The considerate...

We provide a new characterization of implementability of reduced form mechanisms in terms of straightforward second-order stochastic dominance. In addition, we present a simple proof of Matthews' (1984) conjecture, proved by Border (1991), on implementability.

Reinforcement learning in complex natural environments is a challenging task because the agent should generalize from the outcomes of actions taken in one state of the world to future actions in different states of the world. The extent to which human experts find the proper level of...

We present an example of a discounted stochastic game with a continuum of states, finitely many players and actions, and deterministic transitions, that possesses no measurable stationary equilibria, or even stationary approximate equilibria. The example is robust to perturbations of the...

The paper analyzes a perturbation on the players’ knowledge of the game in the traveler’s dilemma, by introducing some uncertainty about the range of admissible actions. The ratio between changes in the outcomes and the size of perturbation is shown to grow exponentially in the range of the...

The modal view in the cognitive sciences holds that consciousness is necessary for abstract, symbolic and rule-following computations. Hence, mathematical thinking in general, and doing arithmetic more specifically, are widely believed to require consciousness. In the current paper we use...

In matching markets the number of blocking pairs is often used as a criterion to compare matchings. We argue that this criterion is lacking an economic interpretation: In many circumstances it will neither reflect the expected extent of partner changes, nor will it capture the satisfaction of...

Market share and quality, or customer satisfaction, go hand in hand. Yet the inference that higher market share indicates higher quality is seldom made. The skepticism is in part fueled by elitism, the association of mass popularity with lower quality, and by cynicism, ascribing market...