Few events give the opportunity to observe the full range of human behavior as wars do. In the case of civil wars in ethnically-mixed societies, the distribution of violence across various segments of the population can provide evidence on the extent and nature of discrimination. As in the case...

A large literature is concerned with analysis and empirical application of theories of decision making for environments with risky outcomes. Expected value theory has been known for centuries to be subject to critique by St. Petersburg paradox arguments. More recently, theories of risk aversion...

Lottery experiments have been performed in many contexts to test theories of risk aversion and to measure risk preferences. People are typically offered a series of lotteries with increasing expected payoffs and variances. A person with a concave utility function should switch from risky bets to...

One of the reasons why market economies are able to thrive is that they exploit the willingness of entrepreneurs to take risks that laborers might prefer to avoid. Markets work because they remunerate good judgement and punish mistakes. Indeed, modern contract theory is based on the assumption...

When implementing an economic institution in the field or in the laboratory, the participants' action spaces and the institution's outcomes are typically discrete, while our theoretical analysis of the institution often assumes the sets are continuous. Predictions by the continuous model...

We report the results from a series of experiments designed to investigate behavior in two settings that are frequently posited in the policy literature as generating different outcomes: private property and common property. The experimental settings closely parallel earlier experimental studies...

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We report the results of an experiment designed to examine the effect of opportunity to provide an explanation for inaccurate results and predictability of behavior on managersâ?? reporting bias and investorsâ?? ability to decipher the bias. We conduct 20 experimental sessions, each comprised...

Contrary to the predictions of non-cooperative game theory, trust and reciprocity are commonly reported in simple games. We conduct a one-shot investment game to examine how social distance affects behavior in two-person exchanges. Two aspects of social distance are examined: ex post revelation...

We introduce a parametric model of other-regarding preferences in which my emotional state determines the marginal rate of substitution between my own and others' payoffs, and thus my subsequent choices. In turn, my emotional state responds to relative status and to the kindness or unkindness of...