It is commonly assumed that friendship should generally benefit agents' ability to tacitly coordinate with others. However, this has never been tested on two "opposite poles" of coordination, namely, games of strategic complements and substitutes. We present an experimental study in which...

In a variety of individual decision contexts, people have been shown to exhibit presentbiased time preferences. Little is known, however, about discounting when there are trade-offs between own and others' consumption. In this paper, we provide a systematic analysis of present bias in individual...

The paper reports on an experiment on two-player double-auction bargaining with private values. We consider a setting with discrete two-point overlapping distributions of traders' valuations, in which there exists a fully efficient equilibrium. We show that if there are traders that behave...

A key challenge in developing countries interested in providing early childhood development programs at scale is whether these programs can be effectively delivered through existing public service infrastructures. We present the results of a randomized experiment evaluating the effects of a...

This paper uses a novel experimental design to study the contagion of pro- and antisocial behavior and the role of social proximity among peers. Across systematic variations thereof, we find that anti-social behavior is generally more contagious than pro-social behavior. Surprisingly, we also...

We investigate the effects of an institutional mechanism that incentivizes taxpayers to blow the whistle on collusive corruption and tax compliance. We explore this through a formal leniency program. In our experiment, we nest collusive corruption within a tax evasion framework. We not only...

For millennia alcoholic drinks have played an important role in food security and health (both positive and negative), but consumption patterns of beer, wine and spirits have altered substantially over the past two centuries. So too have their production technologies and industrial organization....

We use laboratory experiments to study communication games with partially verifiable information. In these games, based on Glazer and Rubinstein (2004, 2006), an informed sender sends a two-dimensional message to a receiver, but only one dimension of the message can be verified. We compare a...

This paper develops a dynamic model of legislative policy making with evolving, privately observed policy preferences. Our goal is to find conditions under which decision rules, which assign feasible policies based on the legislators' preferences, are sustainable in the long run. We show that...

This paper proposes a theory of migration decisions in which cultural traits play a role. Individuals are assumed to value comfort (high wages) and conformity (interactions with individuals who share similar world views). Regions are assumed to differ economically (average wages) and culturally...