Industrial organization is mainly concerned with the behavior of large firms, especially when it comes to oligopoly theory. Experimental industrial organization, therefore, faces a problem: How can firms be brought into the laboratory? The main approach relies on framing: Call individuals...

The paper presents the concept of an "imitation equilibrium" and explores it in the context of some simple oligopoly models. The concept applies to normal form games enriched by a "reference structure" specifying a "reference group" for every player. The reference group is a set of other...

While there is an extensive literature on the theory of in finitely repeated games, empirical evidence on how “the shadow of the future” affects behavior is scarce and inconclusive. We simulate in finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games in the lab by having a random continuation rule....

Can a social norm of trust and reciprocity emerge among strangers? We investigate this question by examining behavior in an experiment where subjects repeatedly play a two-player binary ―trust‖ game. Players are randomly and anonymously paired with one another in each period. The...

The paper presents the concept of an "imitation equilibrium" and explores it in the context of some simple oligopoly models. The concept applies to normal form games enriched by a "reference structure" specifying a "reference group" for every player. The reference group is a set of other...

We experimentally study behavior in a simple voting game where players have private information about their preferences. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences. Applying the linking mechanism suggested by Jackson and...

We experimentally study behavior in a simple voting game where players have private information about their preferences. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences, which leads to inefficiency. We analyze an exogenous linking...

Even though decision-making in small teams is pervasive in business and in private life, littleis known about subjects’ preferences with respect to individual and team decision-making andabout the consequences of respecting these preferences. We report the results from anexperimental...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation andsubject it to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysiswe …nd that the different predictions of previous imitation models aredue to different informational assumptions, not to different behavioralrules. It is...