We exploit a unique opportunity to study how a large population of players in the field learn to play a novel game with a complicated and non-intuitive mixed strategy equilibrium.  We argue that standard models of belief-based learning and reinforcement learning are unable to explain the data,...

This paper proposes a model of cabdrivers' labor supply, building on Henry S. Farber's (2005, 2008) empirical analyses and Botond Kőszegi and Matthew Rabin's (2006; henceforth “KR”) theory of reference-dependent preferences. Following KR, our model has targets for hours as well as income,...

The overuse of medical services including antibiotics is often blamed on Physician Induced Demand. But since this theory is about physician motivations, it is difficult to test. We conduct an audit study in which physician financial incentives, beliefs about what patients want, and desires to...

This paper investigates the crowding-out effect of formal insurance on informal risk-sharing arrangements via theory and laboratory experiment. Our model and simulation predict that the crowding out of private transfers is often more than one-for-one and will reduce the total risk coverage....

From 2010-2015, China liberalized margin lending, resulting in an unprecedented expansion of margin loans to financially constrained households. We implement a regression discontinuity design based on the ranking procedure used during the deregulation and estimate a large impact of this credit...

The literature has mixed results on how formal insurance affects informal risk sharing. Whether such effect is motivated extrinsically or intrinsically also remains unclear. We design a lab experiment in which formal insurance is introduced and removed unexpected and the insurance purchase...

This paper proposes an approach that demands fewer data to estimate the effect of social interaction on stock market participation. Using data available publicly, we construct a sequence of measures of aggregated stock returns that are based on the same stock returns information and embed social...

With the widespread growth of online commerce, we observe an increasing amount of refunds on purchases. Do these refunds affect consumption differently than regular income such as salaries? This paper uses transaction-level data from a bank to examine the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of...

Bilateral gift exchange often benefits the gift-giver, but what is the effect of multilateral gift exchange? This study employs a two-giver-one-recipient real task gift exchange game to investigate the effect of gift competition. We show that gift competition hurts givers and benefits...