Withdrawal penalties are common features of time deposit contracts offered by commercial banks, as well as individual retirement accounts and employer-sponsored plans. Moreover, there is a significant amount of early withdrawals from these accounts, despite the associated penalties, and...

This paper studies a class of multi-self decision-making models proposed in economics, psychology, and marketing. In this class, choices arise from the set-dependent aggregation of a collection of utility functions, where the aggregation procedure satisfies some simple properties. We propose a...

We investigate the effect of delay on prices in bargaining situations using a data set containing thousands of captives ransomed from Barbary pirates between 1575 and 1692. Plausibly exogenous variation in the delay in ransoming provides evidence that negotiating delays decreased the size of...

This paper proposes a theory of cooperation over finite horizons, focusing on public good contribution games, that implies the broadly documented feature of decreasing cooperation over time. The central assumption is that there are two types of players: those who only care about their own...

This paper considers the effect of contracting limitations in risk-sharing networks, arisingfor example from observability, verifiability, complexity or cultural constraints. Wederive necessary and sufficient conditions for Pareto efficiency under these constraints ina general setting, and we...

This paper experimentally investigates how individual preferences, through unrestricted deliberation, are aggregated into a group decision in two contexts: reciprocating gifts and choosing between lotteries. In both contexts, we find that median group members have a significant impact on the...

This paper studies costly network formation in the context of risk sharing. Neighboring agents negotiate agreements as in Stole and Zwiebel (1996), which results in the social surplus being allocated according to the Myerson value. We uncover two types of inefficiency: overinvestment in social...

We investigate situations in which agents can communicate to each other only through a chain of intermediators, for example, because they have to obey institutionalized communication protocols. We assume that all involved in the communication are strategic and might want to influence the action...