Social comparison has potentially far reaching consequences in many economic domains. We conducted a field experiment to examine how social comparison affects workers' effort provision if their own wage or that of a co-worker is cut. Workers were assigned to groups of two, performed identical...

Countercyclical risk aversion can explain major puzzles such as the high volatility of asset prices. Evidence for its existence is, however, scarce because of the host of factors that simultaneously change during financial cycles. We circumvent these problems by priming financial professionals...

A key ingredient of many popular asset pricing models is that investors exhibit countercyclical risk aversion, which helps explain major economic puzzles such as the strong and systematic variation in risk premiums over time and the high volatility of asset prices. There is, however,...

We conducted an experiment with 182 inmates from a maximum security prison to analyze the impact of criminal identity salience on cheating. The results show that inmates cheat more when we exogenously render their criminal identity more salient. This effect is specific to individuals who have a...

We study the stability of voluntary cooperation in response to varying group growth rates. Using a laboratory public-good game, we construct a situation where increasing group size yields potential efficiency gains, but only with sustained cooperation. We then study the effect of exogenously...

We study how the willingness to enter long-term bilateral relationships affects cooperation even when parties have little information about each other, ex ante, and cooperation is otherwise unenforceable. We experimentally investigate a finitely-repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma, allowing players to...

We study the stability of voluntary cooperation in response to varying rates at which a group grows. Using a laboratory public-good game with voluntary contributions and economies of scale, we construct a situation in which expanding a group’s size yields potential efficiency gains, but only...

We explore both theoretically and experimentally how final prices and security holdings in an asset market influence and forecast behavior and outcomes in an affiliated coordination game. We vary the incentives from the market relative to payoffs from the game, the number of players in a group,...

We explore both theoretically and experimentally how final prices and security holdings in an asset market influence and forecast behavior and outcomes in an affiliated coordination game. We vary the incentives from the market relative to payoffs from the game, the number of players in a group,...

We study the relationship between economic activity, modeled by a minimum-effort coordination game, and asset markets in which securities' values correspond to outcomes of the activity. We explore both theoretically and experimentally how final prices and asset holdings in the market influence...