Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual...

We develop, and experimentally test, a behavioral model of deal- making which includes binding contracts and informal agreements as distinct but related special cases. The key assumptions: people are mostly honest; they suffer costs of overcoming temptation to renege; and they tend to split gains...

Previous research has suggested that communication and especially promises in-crease cooperation in laboratory experiments. This has been taken as evidence for internal motivations such as guilt aversion or preference for promise keeping. The goals of this paper are to examine messages under a...

Previous research has suggested that communication and especially promises increase cooperation in laboratory experiments. This has been taken as evidence for internal motivations such as guilt aversion or preference for promise keeping. The goal of this paper was to examine messages under a...

We report the results of an experiment designed to study the effect of individual asset-holdings restrictions on the formation of bubbles and crashes in laboratory asset markets. Bubbles and crashes are a quite robust phenomenon in experimental settings. Motivated by demand-control policies...

Kirchler et al. (2012) make a number of contributions to experimental research on asset markets. One of their findings is that the levels of cash holdings of traders do not affect asset prices when fundamentals follow a constant time trajectory. We report a new experiment in which we replicate...