A host of recent studies show that attention allocation has important economic consequences. This paper reports the first empirical test of a cost-benefit model of the endogenous allocation of attention. The model assumes that economic agents have finite mental processing speeds and cannot...

Empirically determining whether wage differentials arise because of discrimination is extremely difficult, and distinguishing between different theories of discrimination is harder still. This paper exploits a number of unique features of a high-stakes television game show to determine which...

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to test the predictions of a dynamic global game designed to capture the self-fulfilling nature of speculative attacks. The game has two stages and a large number of heterogeneously informed agents deciding whether to attack the status quo. In the first...

We experimentally test whether the possibility of building a reputation impacts behavior in the manner suggested by theory. Our unified reputation framework theoretically allows for either the good or the bad reputation prediction to emerge. Our design additionally varies whether reputation...

This paper introduces an emerging interdisciplinary research field, namely neuroeconomics, which uses the neuroscientific methods to investigate the neural systems supporting economically relevant behaviors. Traditional economic research is restricted to the level of describing decision...

What is the motivational effect of imposing a minimum effort requirement? Agents may no longer exert voluntary effort but merely meet the requirement. Here, we examine how such hidden costs of control change when control is considered legitimate. We study a principal-agent model where control...

The quantal response equilibrium (QRE) notion of McKelvey and Palfrey (1995) has recently attracted considerable attention, due in part to its widely documented ability to rationalize observed behavior in games played by experimental subjects. However, even with strong a priori restrictions on...

Communication has been shown to play a positive role in promoting trust, yet there is no evidence on how sensitive this result is to the size of the gains from cooperation. To investigate this issue, we adopt an experimental design in which a trustee can send a free form message to a trustor,...

Informal contracting is widely spread, but what makes it work in the absence of institutional enforcement and repetition? According to game-theoretic models of social capital, informal relationships can help agents self-enforce contracts when third-party enforcement is not available, because...

Since the seminal paper of Hoffman et al. (1994), an entitlement effect is believed to exist in the Ultimatum Game, in the sense that proposers who have earned their role (as opposed to having it randomly allocated) offer a smaller share of the pie to their matched responder. The entitlement...