In an experiment, a group of strangers was randomly divided in pairs to play a prisoners’ dilemma; this process was indefinitely repeated. Cooperation did not increase when subjects could send public messages amounting to binding promises of future play.

It is standard in experimental economics to use decontextualized designs where payoff structures are presented using neutral language. Here we show that cooperation in such a neutrally framed Prisoner’s Dilemma is equivalent to a PD framed as contributing to a cooperative endeavour....

This article develops a simple theoretical framework to show how forecasters may bias downward point predictions under the assumption that the asymmetric loss function is directly related to the (Mean) Absolute Percentage Error (M)APE.

We prove a relationship between the bordered Hessian in an equality constrained extremum problem and the Hessian of the equivalent lower-dimension unconstrained problem. This relationship can be used to derive principal minor conditions for the former from the relatively simple and accessible...

When risk averse forecasters are presented with risk neutral proper scoring rules, they report probabilities whose ratios are shaded towards 1. If elicited probabilities are used as inputs to decision-making, naive elicitors may violate first-order stochastic dominance.

This paper proposes a homotopy method for implementing counterfactual experiments in empirical models with multiple equilibria. A key assumption is that the equilibrium selection function does not jump discontinuously between equilibria as we continuously change the structural parameters.

Consider a contest for a prize in which each player knows his/her own ability, but may or may not know those of his/her rivals (the complete or incomplete information regimes). Our main result is that, if the value of the prize is high, more effort and output are engendered under incomplete...

In social choice settings with linear preferences, random dictatorship is known to be the only social decision scheme satisfying strategyproofness and ex post efficiency. When also allowing indifferences, random serial dictatorship (RSD) is a well-known generalization of random dictatorship that...

This note presents results from modified dictator games in which the payoff-relevant game is either chosen randomly or by the recipients. We do not observe reciprocal behavior when recipients choose the game: Dictators do not condition their donations on the game chosen by recipients.

We show that subjects who set their minimum acceptable offer to zero in an ultimatum game are the most generous players in a dictator game. This finding challenges the interpretation of the acceptance of low offers as payoff-maximizing behavior.