The population of most developed societies is ‘graying'. As life expectancy increases and the large baby-boom generation approaches retirement age, this has critical consequences for maintaining a high standard of living and the sustainability of pension systems. In the light of these...

In this paper, we investigate individuals' investment in status in an environment where no monetary return can possibly be derived from reaching a better relative position. We use a real-effort experiment in which we permit individuals to learn and potentially improve their relative position in...

We propose a new organizing scheme for classifying types of experiments. In addition to the standard categories of laboratory and field experiments, we suggest a new category: “extra-laboratory experiments.” These are experiments that have the same spirit as laboratory experiments, but are...

The notions of one's social identity and group membership have recently become topics for economic theory and experiments, and recent research has shown the importance of identity in a wide array of economic environments. But predictions are unclear when there is some trade-off between one's...

It is traditional in experimental games to allow participants to choose only actions or possibly communicate intended play. In sequential two-person games, we require first movers to express a preference between responder choices. We find that responder behavior differs substantially according...

The standard procedure in experimental economics maintains anonymity among laboratory participants. Yet, many field interactions are conducted with neither complete anonymity nor complete familiarity. When we are involved in interactive situations in the field, we usually have some clues...

Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentallythe role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one’sperformance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher whenindividuals are...

We study experimentally how the ability to communicate affects the frequency andeffectiveness of flexible and inflexible contracts in a bilateral trade context where sellers canadjust trade quality after observing a post-contractual cost shock and a discretionary buyertransfer. In the absence of...

The gift-exchange game is a form of sequential prisoner’s dilemma, developed by Fehr, Kirchsteiger, and Riedl (1993), and popularized in a series of papers by Ernst Fehr and co-authors. While the European studies typically feature a high degree of gift exchange, the few U.S. studies...

We examine decision-making under risk and uncertainty in a laboratory experiment. The heart of our design examines how one’s propensity to use Bayes’ rule is affected by whether this rule is aligned with reinforcement or clashes with it. In some cases, we create environments where...