This paper reports experimental tests of two alternative explanations of how players use focal points to select equilibria in one-shot coordination games. Cognitive hierarchy theory explains coordination as the result of common beliefs about players' pre-reflective inclinations towards the...

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...

Consumption surveys often record zero purchases of a good because of a short observation window. Only mean consumption rates can then be inferred. We show that propensity scores can be used to estimate each unit's consumption rate, revealing the distribution. We demonstrate the method using the...

Contributions to public goods simulated in economists' laboratoryexperiments have two peculiarities from the perspective ofstatistical modelling. There is a variety of contributor behaviours(Ledyard, 1995), suggestive perhaps of separate classes ofindividuals, and contributions are doubly...

We study experimentally how taxpayers choose between two tax regimes to fund a public good. The first-best tax regime imposes a general, distortion-free income tax. However, this tax cannot be enforced. The second-best alternative supplements the income tax by a specific commodity tax. This tax...

Multi-unit auctions are sometimes plagued by the so-called exposure problem. In this paper, we analyze a simple game called the chopstick auction' in which bidders are confronted with the exposure problem. We do so both in theory and in a laboratory experiment. In theory, the chopstick auction...

Introducing a threshold in the sense of a minimal project size transforms a public goods game with an inefficient equilibrium into a coordination game with a set of Pareto-superior equilibria. Thresholds may therefore improve efficiency in the voluntary provision of public goods. In our one-shot...

We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong alert effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in...

We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong alert effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in...

We use a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion in an experimental, repeated public goods game. The results show that reinforcement learning leads to dynamics similar to those observed in standard public goods games. However, closer inspection shows that individual decay...