Renegotiation is a common practice in procurement auctions which allows for post-auction price adjustments and is nominally intended to deal with the problem that sellers might underestimate the eventual costs of a project during the auction. Using a combination of theory and experiments, we...

In recent years, a growing number of studies have researchers opting to use "real" effort designs for laboratory experiments where subjects complete an actual task to exert effort rather than using what is perhaps a more traditional design of stylized effort where subjects simply choose an...

My dissertation uses game theoretical and experimental approaches to study how individual's behavior in different informational environments affects economic outcomes and motivations for charitable giving. Chapter 2 "Bargaining with Uncertain Value Distributions" studies a bargaining model in...

This dissertation consists of three empirical chapters. The first chapter examines the extent to which real-world agents are rational in making quantitative expectations, an issue over which there is much debate. In this chapter dynamic models for new plant-level survey data are estimated in...

Charitable giving in the U.S. totaled more than $300 billion in 2009, amounting to about 2% of GDP.These organizations depend on fundraising activities to generate donations from individuals who provide three-quarters of the funding for charitable organizations.Despite the size and scope of...

Inefficiencies in private giving are a common occurrence in public good games. In this dissertation, we ask four questions: do subjects recognize the inefficiency due to the lack of coordination on group giving, is there a simple way to overcome this coordination problem, is there a mechanism...

In this dissertation, I conduct experimental labor markets to investigate the effectiveness of an optimal agency contract in inducing employee effort and maximizing firm profit. I compare firm profit under the optimal agency contract to that under a theoretically sub-optimal contract that relies...