This article uses archival data from English auctions of animal art and eBay gift cards coupled with two laboratory experiments to study the effect of financial stakes on an interdependent decision-making phenomenon critical to organizational success: auction fever. Congruent with rational...

Studies show that identifying contributors significantly increases contributions to public goods. In practice, however, viewing identifiable information is costly, which may discourage people from accessing such information. To address this question, we design a public goods experiment in which...

The idea that there is wisdom from the collective has been forcefully described in “The Wisdom of the Crowds” by James Surowiecki, who argues that the aggregation of information in groups results in better decisions than those that are afforded by any single member of the group. Markets,...

Experiments using economic games are becoming a major source for the study of human social behavior. These experiments are usually conducted with university students who voluntarily choose to participate. Across the natural and social sciences, there is some concern about how this...

Due to the high costs of conflict both in theory and practice, we examine and experimentally test the conditions under which conflict between asymmetric agents can be resolved. We model conflict as a two-agent rent-seeking contest for an indivisible prize. Before conflict arises, both agents may...

We examine subjects' behavior in sender-receiver games where there are gains from trade and alignment of interests in one of the two states. We elicit subjects' beliefs, risk and other-regarding preferences. Our design also allows us to examine the behavior of subjects in both roles, to...

We use extreme value theory (EVT) to develop insights about price theory. Our analysis reveals "detail-independent" equilibrium properties that characterize a large family of models. We derive a formula relating equilibrium prices to the level of competition. When the number of firms is large,...

It is common in organizational life to be simultaneously involved in multiple collective actions. These collective actions may be modeled using public good dilemmas. The developing social dilemma literature has two perspectives – the “divided loyalties” and “conditional cooperation”...

An experimental asset market is used to test the effect of news concerning the underlying value of an asset on its trading price. Participants were divided into two groups and received different expected earnings values. Statistical support is found for the hypothesis that investors underreact...

This experiment investigates contests between groups. Each group has one strong player, with a higher valuation for the prize, and two weak players, with lower valuations. In contests where individual efforts are perfect substitutes, all players expend significantly higher efforts than predicted...