In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's belief about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. A growing number of surveys and experiments asks participants to state beliefs explicitly but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and...

We examine the robustness of information cascades in laboratory experiments. Apart from the situation in which each player can obtain a signal for free (as in the experiment by <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="R1">Anderson and Holt (1997)</xref>, American Economic Review, 87 (5), 847-862), the case of costly signals is studied where...

Using data on one-shot games, we investigate whether players' actions can be viewed as responses to underlying expectations about their opponent's behaviour. In our laboratory experiments, subjects play a set of 14 two-person 3×3 games and state beliefs about which actions they expect their...

Yes, they are. We consider data from experimental cascade games that were run in different laboratories, and find uniformly that subjects are more willing to follow the crowd, the bigger the crowd is-although the decision makers who are added to the crowd should in theory simply follow suit and...

The G8 is considering committing to purchase vaccines against diseases concentrated in low-income countries (if and when desirable vaccines are developed) as a way to spur research and development on vaccines for these diseases. Under such an 'advance market commitment,' one or more sponsors...