This paper describes how to set up a classroom exercise in which students see private signals and make public decisions in sequence. A pattern of conforming decisions in this context is called an information cascade. Once a cascade starts, it is rational for students to ignore their private...

We conduct a large-scale economics experiment paired with a survey to examine the association between individual risk preference and health-related behaviors among adults aged 18-87 years. Risk preference is measured by the lottery choice experiment designed by Holt and Laury [Holt, C.A., Laury,...

We examine the stability of risk preference within subjects by comparing measures obtained from two elicitation methods, an economics experiment with real monetary rewards and a survey with questions on hypothetical gambles. The survey questions have been validated by numerous empirical studies...

We include probabilistic announcements in a standard public goods experiment. Although the possibility of having decisions announced encourages subjects to contribute more to the group account, learning that some individuals are free-riding more than the average has a negative effect.

Recent studies report that economic inequality is associated with reduced government expenditures on social programs. Several prominent social scientists, including Putnam [2000], attribute this relationship to the detrimental Òpsychosocial effectsÓ of group heterogeneity on cooperation. We...

Several non-experimental studies report that income inequality and other forms of population-based heterogeneity reduce levels of trust in society. However, recent work by Glaeser et al. (2000) calls into question the reliability of widely used survey-based measures of trust. Specifically,...