We propose and test a new method for eliciting curvature-controlled discount rates that are invariant to the form of the utility function. The advantage of this method is that individual discount rates can be obtained without knowledge of risk attitude or parametric assumptions about the form of...

This study sheds light on the difficulties people face in cooperating to resist coercion. We adapt a threshold public goods game to investigate whether people are able to cooperate to resist coercion despite individual incentives to free-ride. Behavior in this resistance game is similar to that...

Policies impose lotteries of outcomes on individuals, since we never know exactly what the effects of the policy will be. In order to evaluate alternative policies, we therefore need to make some assumptions about individual preferences, even before social welfare functions are applied. Instead...

This short paper investigates the consequences of voters identifying with special interest groups in a spatial model of electoral competition. We show that, by effectively coordinating voting behavior, identification with interest groups leads to an increase in the size of the winning set, that...

Centipede games and Dutch auctions provide important instances in which game theory fails empirically. The reasons for these empirical failures are not well understood. Standard centipede games and Dutch auctions differ from each other in terms of their Institutional Format (IF), Dynamic...

Experiments are conducted with various purposes in mind including theory testing, mechanism design and measurement of individual characteristics. In each case a careful researcher is constrained in the experimental design by prior considerations imposed either by theory, common sense or past...

Subjective probabilities play a role in many economic decisions. There is a large theoretical literature on the elicitation of subjective probabilities, and an equally large empirical literature. However, there is a gulf between the two. The theoretical literature proposes a range of procedures...

We critically review the methodological practices of two research programs which are jointly called 'neuroeconomics'. We defend the first of these, termed 'neurocellular economics' (NE) by Ross (2008), from an attack on its relevance by Gul and Pesendorfer (2008) (GP). This attack arbitrarily...

We study the risk attitudes of an important segment of the economy: managers. We conduct artefactual field experiments with 130 managers from 12 industrial companies. Our analysis is particularly careful to evaluate alternative models of decision-making under risk. In general, we find that the...

We show that observed choices in discounting experiments are consistent with roughly one-half of the subjects using exponential discounting and one-half using quasi-hyperbolic discounting. We characterize the latent data generating process using a mixture model which allows different subjects to...