Costly competitions between economic agents are modeled as contests. Researchers use laboratory experiments to study contests and test comparative static predictions of contest theory. Commonly, researchers find that participants’ efforts are significantly higher than predicted by the standard...

This document discusses the application of several experimental methods used in Economics and reviews some of the most recent advances in Experimental Economics, a branch of Economics that use those methods to test the validity of theories and examine the role of institutions (in the sense of...

Remote work policies remain controversial mainly because of productivity concerns. The existing literature highlights how the remote setting affects individual productivity yet little is known about how the remote setting affects work in teams - where productivity losses are potentially higher...

Proponents of blockchains believe that this technology will revolutionize e-commerce. To evaluate this belief, we invite several groups of students to transact on a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace built on the platform provided by Origin Protocol Inc., and then we conduct a survey about...

We study the behavior of experimental subjects who have to make a sequence of risky investment decisions in the presence of network externalities. Subjects follow a simple heuristic – investing after positive experiences and reducing their propensity to invest after a failure. This result...

We contrast a standard deterministic signaling game with one where the signal-generating mechanism is stochastic. With stochastic signals a unique equilibrium emerges that involves separation and has intuitive comparative-static properties as the degree of signaling depends on the prior type...

We propose two tests for the equality of covariance matrices between two high-dimensional populations. One test is on the whole variance-covariance matrices, and the other is on offdiagonal sub-matrices which define the covariance between two non-overlapping segments of the high-dimensional...

This paper considers the problem of parameter estimation in a general class of semiparametric models when observations are subject to missingness at random. The semiparametric models allow for estimating functions that are non-smooth with respect to the parameter. We propose a nonparametric...

The conventional Wilcoxon/Mann-Whitney test can be invalid for comparing treatment effects in the presence of missing values or in observational studies. This is because the missingness of the outcomes or the participation in the treatments may depend on certain pre-treatment variables. We...

Motivated by the latest effort to employ banded matrices to estimate a high-dimensional covariance Σ , we propose a test for Σ being banded with possible diverging bandwidth. The test is adaptive to the “large p , small n ” situations without assuming a specific parametric distribution for...