Recent experiments show that public goods can be provided at high levels when mutual monitoring and costly punishment are allowed. All these experiments, however, study monitoring and punishment in a setting where all agents can monitor and punish each other (i.e., in a complete network). The...

We consider a game where one player, the Announcer, has to communicate the value of a payoff relevant state of the world to a set of players who play a coordination game with multiple equilibria. While the Announcer and the players agree that coordination is desirable, since the payoffs of the...

This paper considers the problem of why societies develop differently, a question most recently articulated by Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). We follow North (1990) in defining institutions as the "rules of the game in society." The question then becomes why do different societies develop...

Social learning is the process of individuals learning by observing the actions of others. One odd aspect of the literature on social learning though is that, ironically, learning is not very social because in the real world, although people learn by observing the actions of others, they also...

One constraint we face as economists is not being able to observe all the relevant variables required to test our theories or make policy prescriptions. Laboratory techniques allow us to convert many variables (such as beliefs) that are unobservable in the field into observables. This article...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of the factors that affect the dynamics and severity of bank runs. Our experiments demonstrate that the more information laboratory economic agents can expect to learn about the crisis as it develops, the more willing they are to restrain...

One constraint we face as economists is not being able to observe all the relevant variables required to test our theories or make policy prescriptions. Laboratory techniques allow us to convert many variables (such as beliefs) that are unobservable in the field into observables. This paper...