We study beliefs and choices in a repeated normal-form game. In addition to a baseline treatment with common knowledge of the game structure and feedback about choices in the previous period, we run treatments (i) without feedback about previous play, (ii) with no information about the...

Contest or auction designers who want to maximize the overall revenue are frequently concerned with a trade-off between contest homogeneity and inclusion of contestants with high valuations. In our experimental study, we find that it is not profitable to exclude the most able contestant in favor...

We present an experiment in which extrinsic information (signals) may generate sunspot equilibria. The underlying coordination game has a unique symmetric non-sunspot equilibrium, which is also risk-dominant. Other equilibria can be ordered according to risk dominance. We compare treatments with...

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have to adjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on. This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial. We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...

With the help of a simple model, we show that the hindsight bias can lead to ineffcient delegation decisions. This prediction is tested experimentally. In an online experiment that was conducted during the FIFA World Cup 2010 participants were asked to predict a number of outcomes of the ongoing...

Smith et al. (1988) reported large bubbles and crashes in experimental asset markets, a result that has been replicated by a large literature. Here we test whether the occurrence of bubbles depends on the experimental subjects' cognitive sophistication. In a two-part experiment, we first run a...

There is consensus that the recent financial crisis revolved around a crash of the short-term credit market. Yet there is no agreement around the necessary policies to prevent another credit freeze. In this experiment we test the effects that contract length (i.e. maturity mismatch) has on the...

Risk management and the thorough understanding of the relations betweenfinancial markets and the standard theory of macroeconomics have always been among the topics most addressed by researchers, both financial mathematicians and economists. This work aims at explaining investors behavior from a...

Option pricing models are calibrated to market data of plain vanillas by minimization of an error functional. From the economic viewpoint, there are several possibilities to measure the error between the market and the model. These different specifications of the error give rise to different...

We introduce the notion of realized copula. Based on assumptions of the marginal distributions of daily stock returns and a copula family, realized copula is defined as the copula structure materialized in realized covariance estimated from within-day high-frequency data. Copula parameters are...