Similar to Levati and Neugebauer (2001), a clock is used by which participants can vary their individual contributions for voluntarily providing a public good. As time goes by, participants either in(de)crease their contribution gradually or keep it constant. Groups of two poorly and two richly...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returns from the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presents experimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty depend on the employed parameterization. Specifically, if the value of the...

In an experimental study, we compare individual willingness to cooperate in a public good game after an initial team contest phase. While players in the treatment setup make a conscious decision on how much to invest in the contest, this decision is exogenously imposed on players in the control...

Two types of auction were introduced on the Internet a few years ago and have rapidly been gaining widespread popularity. In both auctions, players compete for an exogenously determined prize by independently choosing an integer in some finite and common strategy space specified by the...

We provide an overview of experimental literature on lottery contests and point out the two main phenomena observed in most contest experiments: overbidding relative to the standard Nash equilibrium prediction and heterogeneous behavior of ex-ante symmetric contestants. Based on the sample of...

The robust finding of overbidding in experimental rent-seeking contests (Tullock 1980) fuels a vivid discussion on its causes (Sheremeta 2013). We contribute to this discussion by reporting a series of experiments on rent-seeking contests. We show that contestants hold myopic beliefs and match...

We investigate experimentally whether emotions affect bidding behavior in a first price auction. To induce emotions, we confront subjects after a first auction series with a positive or negative random economic shock. We then explore the relation between emotions and bidding behavior in a second...

In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values, we scan also the right hand of each subject. We study how the ratio of the length of the index and ring fingers (2D:4D) of the right hand, a measure of prenatal hormone exposure, is...

In clock games, agents receive differently-timed private signals when an asset value is above its fundamental. The price crashes to the fundamental when K of N agents have decided to sell. If selling decisions are private, bubbles can be sustained because people delay selling, after receiving...

This paper describes a simple classroom activity that illustrates how economic theory can be used for mechanism design. The rules for a set of contests are presented; the results typically obtained from these contests illustrate how the prize structure can be manipulated in order to produce a...