Laboratory experiments are frequently used to examine the nature of individuals’ social and risk preferences and inform economic theory. However, it is unknown whether the preferences of volunteer participants are representative of the population from which the participants are drawn, or...

In certain markets success may depend on how well participants anticipate the behavior of other participants who have varying amounts of experience. Understanding if and how people’s behavior depends on competitors’ level of experience is important since in most markets...

Previous research has suggested that communication and especially promises increase cooperation in laboratory experiments. This has been taken as evidence for internal motivations such as guilt aversion or preference for promise keeping. The goal of this paper was to examine messages under a...

The three dissertation essays investigate different aspects of reputation in games where fairness is an important consideration. The first essay studies the effects of reputation on indirect reciprocity in different dictator games. The first experiment places dictators in two environments where...