In a social network in which friendly and rival bilateral links can be formed, how do alliances between decision-makers form, and what determines whether a conflict will arise? We study a network formation game between ex-ante symmetric players in the laboratory to examine the dynamics of...

A relationship between lying behavior and social preferences has often been proposed in explaining patterns of lying aversion (ex. Erat and Gneezy, 2012; Houser, Vetter and Winter, 2012; Maggian and Villeval, 2015). We assess subjects' preferences over social allocation and their lying tendencies in the...

Evidence increasingly points to the importance of reference-dependence in predicting consumer behavior. We utilize detailed data from penny auctions, which first appeared as an internet phenomenon in the late 2000's, to uncover how consumers' prior experiences predict their willingness to try a...

Recent policy discussions have debated whether governments should treat state-owned and private enterprises equally or adopt different policies towards each type of enterprise. Such questions are pertinent for difficult economic climates in which government subsidy towards struggling state-owned...

As consumers in countries around the world become increasingly aware of and sensitive to the products that their foreign counterparts consume, a natural question is what predictions do classic trade frameworks hold when incorporating social comparison-based preferences? We analyze this question...

In a school choice mechanism, school priorities are often based on student exam scores, by which student true ability may not be perfectly revealed. An ex-post fair matching mechanism (for example, Serial Dictatorship) can be undesirable in that it is not ex-ante fair: it may not match students...

The narrowing wage gap between high and low skilled workers in the Chinese labor market in recent years is suggestive of government interventions which may have been implemented in the capital markets. We develop a game theoretic model between a continuum of heterogeneous workers and the...

We investigate the relative merits of the Boston and Serial Dictatorship mechanisms when the timing of students' preference submission over schools varies within the structure of the mechanism. Despite the well-documented disadvantages of the Boston mechanism (Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez, 2003),...

We conduct tests for reference dependent loss aversion using slot machine gamblers' decisions on when to quit playing for a visit to a casino. Evidence for a lagged status-quo reference point is found in the aggregate, while endogenously determined reference points are found when conditioning on...