Can algorithms help people predict behavior in high-stakes prisoner’s dilemmas? Participants watching the pre-play communication of contestants in the TV show Golden Balls display a limited ability to predict contestants’ behavior, while algorithms do significantly better. We provide...

Awards are widely used as incentives in organizations. This paper situates awards in the broader incentives landscape and shows how the motivational value of awards can be understood with a parsimonious theoretical framework that considers three sources of value: the tangible component of an...

We introduce a new method for measuring the decision to lie in experiments. In the game, the decision to lie increases own payment independent of the counterpart's decision, but potentially at a cost for the counterpart. We identify at the individual level the decision to lie, and measure how...

A field experiment (N=113,047 participants) manipulated two factors in the sale of souvenir photos. First, some customers saw a traditional fixed price, whereas others could pay what they wanted (including $0). Second, approximately half of the customers saw a variation in which half of the...

Social scientists have presented evidence that suggests discrimination is ubiquitous: women, nonwhites, and the elderly have been found to be the target of discriminatory behavior across several labor and product markets. Scholars have been less successful at pinpointing the underlying motives...

This study uses a controlled experiment to explore whether there are gender differences in selecting into competitive environments across two distinct societies: the Maasai in Tanzania and the Khasi in India. One unique aspect of these societies is that the Maasai represent a textbook example of...

Economics has typically been the social science of choice to inform public policy and policymakers. In the current paper we contemplate the role behavioral science can play in enlightening policymakers. In particular, we provide some examples of research that has and can be used to inform...

We report an experiment on the effect of intergroup competition on group coordination in the minimal-effort game (Van Huyck et al., 1990). The competition was between two 7-person groups. Each player in each group independently chose an integer from 1 to 7. The group with the higher minimum won...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of optimal learning in repeated coordination games. We find evidence for such learning when we limit both the cognitive demands on players and the information available to them. We also find that uniqueness of the optimal strategy is no guarantee...