Differences in group affiliation may affect the level of cooperation in global commons situations such as programs for the conservation of resources which generate benefits that transcend state boundaries. We design a real-time, cross-cultural common pool resource (CPR) experiment purposely...

Along with the traditional primitives of economic development (material preferences, technology, and endowments), there is a growing interest in exploring how psychological and sociological factores (e.g., bounded rationality, norms, or social preferences) also influence economic decisions, the...

Explanations of poverty, growth and development more generally depend on the assumptions made about individual preferences and the willingness to engage in strategic behaviour. Economic experiments, especially those conducted in the field, have begun to paint a picture of economic agents in...

We ask whether conformity, copying the most observed behavior in a population, can affect free riding in a public goods situation. Our model suggests that, if free riding is sufficiently frequent at the start of a public goods game, conformity will increase the growth rate of free riding. We...

The stylized facts of ultimatum bargaining in the experimental lab are that offers tend to be near an equal split of the surplus and low, near perfect offers are routinely rejected. Bimmore et al (1995) use aspiration-based evolutionary dynamics to model the evolution of fair play in a binary...

We conduct a vignette study of the propensity to commit the sunk cost fallacy with 106 undergradu-ates. Our contribution is to examine the socio-demographic determinants of "sunk cost sensitivity." The likelihood of commitment is found to be positively correlated with some ethnicities,...

While many experiments demonstrate that the actual behavior is different than predicted behavior, they have not shown that economic reasoning is necessarily incorrect. Instead, these experiments illustrate that the problem with homo economicus is that his preferences have been mis-specified....

Data from a recent ?eld experiment suggests that differences in participation rates are responsible for much of the variations in revenues across formats in charity auctions. We provide a theoretical framework for the analysis of this, and other related, results. The model illustrates the limits...

Models of job tournaments and competitive workplaces more generally predict that while individual effort may increase as competition intensifies between workers, the incentive for workers to cooperate with each other diminishes. We report on a field experiment conducted with workers from a...

We replicate previous results showing that stakes do not affect offers in the Ultimatum Game and show that stakes also have no effect on allocations in the Dictator Game. Both results are robust to the inclusion of demographic factors.