Theory and empirics suggest that by curbing competition, incumbent electricity companies which used to be and here are referred to as Vertically Integrated Utilities (VIUs), can increase their profitability through combined ownership of generation and transmission and/or distribution networks....

In a series of articles and manuscripts (e.g., Kruger & Dunning, 1999, Dunning et al., 2003, Ehrlinger et al., 2005), Dunning, Kruger and their collaborators argued that the unskilled lack the metacognitive ability to realize their incompetence. We propose that the unskilled-and-unaware problem...

We study a setting where a buyer chooses one of several available options whose values are initially unknown but can be discovered through costly search. Search is sequential, with perfect recall, which implies it is optimal for the buyer to search until the best option encountered so far...

Over the past decades psychological theories have made significant headway into economics, culminating in the 2002 (partially) and 2017 Nobel prizes awarded for work in the field of Behavioural Economics. Many of the insights imported from psychology into economics share a common trait: the...

We provide a game-theoretic model of academic organizations, focusing on the strategic interaction of prototypical overseers, administrators, and professors. By identifying key principal-agent games routinely played in colleges and universities, we begin to unpack the black box typically used to...

Are communication failures common? We revisit classic examples of coordination failure and explore experimentally, in a 2x2 design, the effects of deviation costs and loss aversion. Our results add to our understanding of how to engineer coordination successes in the laboratory

Coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria have attracted major theoretical attention over the past two decades. Two early path-breaking sets of experimental studies were widely interpreted as suggesting that coordination failure is a common phenomenon in the laboratory. We identify the...

We investigate experimentally the conjecture that loss avoidance solves the tension in stag-hunt games for which payoff dominance and risk dominance make conflicting predictions. Contrary to received textbook wisdom, money-losing outcomes do shift behavior, albeit not strongly, toward the...

Draft of a contribution to Kincaid & Ross Modern Guide to Philosophy of Economics (Elgar). To talk in 2020 about the foundations of behavioural and experimental economics (BE and EE from here on), or for that matter the methodological and substantive relationships between economic and...