We study the effects of loaded instructions in a bribery experiment. We find a strong gender effect: men and women react differently to real-world framing. The treatment effect becomes significant once we allow for gender specific coefficients. Our paper contributes to the (small) literature on...

We replicate three pricing tasks of Gneezy, List and Wu (2006) for which they document the so-called uncertainty effect, namely, that people value a binary lottery over non-monetary outcomes less than other people value the lottery's worse outcome. While the authors implemented a verbal lottery...

Heuristics are all around us, both in the real world and the literature. There are many of them and there are many — too many — definitions of them. In this chapter we focus on the history of fast and frugal heuristics, as sketched out comprehensively in Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABC Research...

I investigate the conjecture (proposed by his namesake Vernon L. Smith) that Adam Smith was afflicted by Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. I summarize the evidence confirming this conjecture. Concluding that on balance there is considerable evidence supporting Smith’s...

Adam Smith’s view of the proper role for government in commercial societies remains a source of debate. Here we sketch out in simple game-theoretic terms the numerous public-goods provision and externalities problems on display in particular in Book V of The Wealth of Nations. Casting these...

Conceptual lenses, or models (Allison 1969; Ortmann 2008), draw on stable ways of thinking about the world, or “reasoning routines”. We explore the deep structure of Adam Smith’s work, and to what extent it is the result of a set of “reasoning routines” that, at an early stage of his...

Background: Infertility affects one in eight couples worldwide. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is now considered a mainstream fertility treatment to increase the chance of conceiving a child in infertile individuals. The main cause of infertility is advanced female age due to the number and...

Luckman et al. (2018) experimentally tested the conjecture that a single model of risky intertemporal choice can account for both risky and intertemporal choices, and under the conditions of their experiment, found evidence supporting it. Given the existing literature, that is a remarkable...