Most experiments on decision theory ask individual subjects to make more than one decision. The isolation hypothesis is commonly used to justify the choice of the random lottery incentive mechanism as the preferred payoff protocol. This research note reports on the main findings on the...

Experiments on choice under risk typically involve multiple decisions by individual subjects. The choice of mechanism for selecting decision(s) for payoff is an essential design feature that is often driven by appeal to the isolation hypothesis or the independence axiom. We report two...

We test for different theories purporting to explain cross-country differences in income redistribution through standardized experimental choices. US Americans and Italians demand less redistribution than Norwegians and Germans, regardless of whether self-interest is relevant. Those earning (or...

This paper presents an experimental study analyzing common consequence effects with binary choice, willingness-to-pay (WTP), and willingness-to-accept (WTA). Consistent with previous research we do not find clearcut evidence of fanning out in the absence of certainty effects. Violation rates of...

In previous models of (cumulative) prospect theory reference-dependence of preferences is imposed beforehand and the location of the reference point is exogenously determined. This note provides a foundation of prospect theory, where reference-dependence is derived from preference conditions and...

This paper presents an online-experiment on overconfidence in the context of financial markets. Our subject pool consists of institutional investors, investment advisors and individual investors, all of them being registered users of a large online platform for market sentiment data. Due to...

Most pure public goods like lighthouses, dams, or national defense provide utility mainly by insuring against hazardous events. Our paper focuses on this insurance character of public goods. As for private actions against hazardous events, one can distinguish between self-insurance (SI) and...

This paper presents an experimental test of several independence conditions implied by expected utility and alternative models. We perform a repeated choice experiment and fit an error model that allows us to discriminate between true violations of independence and those that can be attributed...

This paper tests Birnbaum’s (2004) theory that the constant consequence paradoxes of Allais are due to violations of coalescing, the assumption that when two branches lead to the same consequence, they can be combined by adding their probabilities. Rank dependent utility and cumulative...

This note presents an experimental study of the random lottery incentive mechanism. In the baseline treatment we observe risk behavior in a given choice problem. We show that by integrating a second, asymmetrically dominated choice problem in a random incentive mechanism risk behavior can be...