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...

The Verifiability Approach is a lie detection method based on the insight that truth-tellers provide precise details whereas liars sometimes remain vague to avoid being exposed. We provide a-game-theoretic analysis of a speaker who wants to be acquitted and an investigator who prefers to find...

Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research leads to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. Is it reasonable to expect values on personality scales to be predictive of behavior in economic games? It is undoubted...

Minority games are a stylized description of strategic situations with both coordination and competition. These games are widely studied using either simulations or laboratory experiments. Simulations can show the dynamics of aggregate behavior, but the results of such simulations depend on the...

Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research leads to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. Is it reasonable to expect values on personality scales to be predictive of behavior in economic games? It is undoubted...

Detecting heterogeneity within a population is crucial in many economic and financial applications. Econometrically, this requires a credible determination of multimodality in a given data distribution. We propose a straightforward yet effective technique for mode inference in discrete data...

For certain goods, higher levels of congestion imply higher levels of expected future entry costs. This provides current users of the good with an incentive to hoard, that is, to lengthen their duration of good use, in order avoid entry costs later on. We test for hoarding of university...

For certain goods, higher levels of congestion imply higher levels of expected future entry costs. This provides current users of the good with an incentive to hoard, that is, to lengthen their duration of good use, in order avoid entry costs later on. We test for hoarding of university...

According to standard economic wisdom, fixed costs should not matter for pricing decisions. However, outside economics, it is widely accepted that firms need to increase their prices after a fixed cost rise. In this note, we show that a liquidity-constrained firm that maximizes lifetime profits...

How do customer loyalty programs create switching costs? We estimate the demand effects of tier levels within a frequent flier program by exploiting discrete tier thresholds. We have two main results. First, members increase demand to reach a higher tier level just before the end of the calendar...