In an experiment on the repeated prisoner s dilemma where intended actions are implemented with noise, Fudenberg et al. (2012) observe that non-equilibrium strategies of the "tit-for-tat" family are largely adopted. Furthermore, they do not find support for risk dominance of TFT as a determinant...

In his classic article "An Essay on Bargaining" Schelling (1956) argues that ignorance might actually be strength rather than weakness. We test and confirm Schelling's conjecture in a simple take-it-or-leave bargaining experiment where the proposer can choose between two possible offers. Option...

We examine the influence of guilt and trust on the performance of credence goods markets. An expert can make a promise to a consumer first, whereupon the consumer can express her trust by paying an interaction price before the expert's provision and charging decisions. We argue that the expert's...

Credence goods markets suffer from inefficiencies arising from informational asymmetries between expert sellers and customers. While standard theory predicts that inefficiencies disappear if customers can verify the quality received, verifiability fails to yield efficiency in experiments with...

While strong social ties help individuals cope with missing institutions, trade is essentially limited to those who are part of the social network. We examine what makes the decision to trust a stranger different from the decision to trust a member of a given social network (a friend), by...

The paper presents a new meta data set covering 13 experiments on the social learning games by Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch (1992). The large amount of data makes it possible to estimate the empirically optimal action for a large variety of decision situations and ask about the economic...

We study experimentally the effect of bargaining power in two sequential mechanisms that offer the possibility to trade at a fixed price before an auction. In the "Buy-It-Now" format, the seller has the bargaining power and offers a price prior to the auction; whereas in the "Sell-It-Now"...

Why do farm households inefficiently allocate resources across the plots they cultivate? We explore how these production inefficiencies relate to consumption decisions and information sharing within the household. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, male producers allocate too few inputs to their...

Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information between sellers and consumers that may give rise to inefficiencies, such as under- and overtreatment or market break-down. We study in a large experiment with 936 participants the determinants for efficiency in credence goods...

In developing countries with weak institutions, there is implicitly a large reliance on elections to instill norms of accountability and reduce corruption. In this paper we show that electoral discipline may be ineffective in reducing corruption when political competition is too high or too low....