The popularity of open ascending auctions is often attributed to the fact that openly observable bidding allows to aggregate dispersed information. Another reason behind the frequent utilization of open auction formats may be that they activate revenue enhancing biases. In an experiment, we...

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect ofmaking others' behaviour a controlled variable,but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute thepool of subjects. This paper proposes andimplements a new experimental design, the Conditional...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

Economic behavior often takes place in groups of small numbers of peopleinteracting with each other (like work teams, neighborhoods, socialnetworks, etc.). Characteristic of such interaction is the development of(affective) interpersonal relationships, or social ties. According tosociologists,...

We compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays arepeated public good game to astrangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations.Subjects in the partners conditioncontribute from the first period on significantly more to the public good...

We study a model of collective decision making with endogenous information collection.Agents collect information about the consequences of a project, communicate, and then vote onthe project. We examine under what conditions communication may increase the probability thatgood decisions are made....

We develop a theoretical framework for studying the effects of interaction on the quaJity of decision-making by monetary policy committees. We show that interaction, i.e. increasing one's expertise through an exchange of views, is most likely not to result in interdependent voting...