In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter (Schumpeter 1954a) dismissed Adam Smith's Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976) in a blunt and ad hominem manner. We argue that Schumpeter's assessment resulted from his failure to appreciate the rhetorical structure of...

We discuss ways to cope with uneven expected lab earnings that are the likely results of role assignments. We identify three problems associated with uneven earnings in the lab: of social preferences, of low marginal return for effort, and of perceived deception. Mining the opinions of...

Widely accepted as a low-cost, fast-turnaround solution with acceptable validity, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is increasingly being used to source participants for academic studies. Yet two commonly raised concerns remain: the presence of quasi-professional respondents, or...

We study how donors decide which charity to give to. To this end, we construct a theoretical model that clarifies the conditions in which the stand-alone benefit from giving, price of giving, and cost of information acquisition inform giving decisions. The model shows that giving decisions are...

Self-regulatory organizations (SROs) can be found in education, healthcare, and other not-for-profit sectors as well as the accounting, financial, and legal professions. DeMarzo et al. (2005) show theoretically that SROs can create monopoly market power for their affiliated agents, but that...

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 propose a computational model to study (the evolution of) post-secondary education. Consumer who differ in quality shop around for desirable colleges or universities. Firm that differ in quality signal the availability of their services to desirable students. Colleges and universities, as...

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...