How do people make investment decisions when they receive outcome feedback? We examinedhow well the standard mean-variance model and two reinforcement models predict people’sportfolio decisions. The basic reinforcement model predicts a learning process that relies solelyon the portfolio’s...

E-nstructions facilitates the use of electronic instructions in computerized laboratory ex-periments in social sciences. In this article I provide a set of guidelines for the installationand the use of E-nstructions.

According to the accountability principle a person’s fair allocation takes into accountthe input-relevant variables she can influence, like effort, but not the variablesshe cannot influence, like a randomly assigned exogenous factor. This study is basedon a real effort-task experiment, where...

“Waste not want not” expresses our culture’s aversion to waste. “I could have gotten the samething for less” is a sentiment that can diminish pleasure in a transaction. We study people’s willingnessto “pay” to avoid this spoiler. In one scenario, participants imagined they were...

One-way communication has been found to substantially increasecontributions in linear voluntary contribution mechanisms. We confirmthe robustness of this result in the presence of income heterogeneity.

Whether behavior converges toward rational play or fair play in repeated ultimatum games depends on which player yields first. If responders concede first by accepting low offers, proposers would not need to learn to offer more, and play would converge toward unequal sharing. By the same token,...

In generosity games, one agreement payo is exogenously given,whereas the other is endogenously determined by the proposer's choice of the"pie" size. This has been shown to induce pie choices which are either efficiencyor equality seeking. In our experiment, before playing the generosity...

The existing literature acknowledges that a mismatch between the experimenter'sand the subjects' models of an experimental task can adversely aect the interpretation ofdata from laboratory experiments. We discuss why the two common experimental designs(between-subjects and within-subjects) used...

We augment a standard dictator game to investigate how preferences for an environmental project relate to willingness to limit others’ choices. We explore this issue by distinguishing three student groups: economists, environmental economists, and environmental social scientists. We find that...

The Porter hypothesis suggests that environmental regulations, such as restricting firms to reduce pollution, stimulates innovations and create a win-win situation for the environment and for firms. It has received a great deal of attention from academics as well as bureaucrats who disagree...