This paper investigates whether smokers exhibit greater time discounting than non-smokers, and how short-term nicotine deprivation affects time discounting. A unique feature of our experiment is that our subjects receive rewards not only of money, but also of actual tobacco. This is done in...

This paper investigates the individual outcomes of irrational thinking, including paranormality and non-scientific thinking. These modes of thinking are identified by factor analysis from a 2008 survey. Income and happiness are used as measures of performance. Empirical results reveal that...

This paper explores the consequences and implications of the "dual role of promotion" in an environment where a firm must simultaneously achieve two distinct goals -- assignment and incentive provision -- via the strategic use of promotions. We argue that the efficient promotion rule is...

Using a natural experiment designed by the Italian national test administrator (INVALSI) to monitor test procedures in Italian primary schools, this paper shows that the presence of an external examiner who monitors test procedures has both a direct and an indirect effect on the measured...

In order to respond to the social security needs of an increasingly aged population, many governments with limited budgets are required to focus available resources on the direct causes of peoplefs anxieties about aging. This study investigated the causes of peoplefs anxieties about life after...

Potential bidders respond to a sellerfs choice of auction mechanism for a common-value or affiliated-values asset by endogenous decisions whether to incur an information-acquisition cost (and observe a private estimate), or forgo competing. Privately informed participants decide whether to incur...

Following Barbera, Sonnenschein, and Zhou (1991, Econometrica 59, 595-609), we study rules (or social choice functions) through which agents select a subset from a set of objects. We investigate domains on which there exist nontrivial strategy-proof rules. We establish that the set of separable...

We consider the problem of choosing a level of a public good on an interval of the real line among a group of agents. A probabilistic rule chooses a probability distribution over the interval for each preference profile. We investigate strategy-proof probabilistic rules in the case where...

Economic experiments conducted in laboratories employing an induced-values methodology can report on allocative efficiencies observed. This methodology is limited by requiring the experimenter to know subjectsf motivations, an impossibility in field experiments. Allocative efficiency implies a...

This paper examines the questions of who participates in the provision of a public good through the voluntary participation of agents in the presence of strong complementarity between a public good and a private good. We show that the greater the initial endowment of the private good that agents...