“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...

We study time preferences in a real-effort experiment with a one-month horizon. We report thattwo thirds of choices suggest negative time preferences. Moreover, choice reversal over time iscommon even if temptation plays no role. We propose and measure three distinct concepts ofchoice reversal...

Agents compete to acquire a limited economic opportunity of uncertain pro…tability.Each agent decides how much he acquires public signals before making investmentunder fear of preemption. I show that equilibria have various levels of e¢ ciency undermild competition. The e¤ect of competition...

Agents compete to solve a problem. Each agent knows own computational capacityas private information and simultaneously chooses either a risky or a safe problemsolving method. This paper analyzes the optimal prize schemes from the perspectiveof the prize designer who wishes to …nd a solution as...