We study the Diamond-Dybvig model of financial intermediation (JPE, 1983) under the assumption that depositors have information about previous decisions. Depositors decide sequentially whether to withdraw their funds or continue holding them in the bank. If depositors observe the history of all...

We report experimental evidence on the effect of observability of actions on bank runs. We model depositors' decision-making in a sequential framework, with three depositors located at the nodes of a network. Depositors observe the other depositors' actions only if connected by the network....

We provide experimental evidence that panic bank runs occur in the absence of problems with fundamentals and coordination failures among depositors, the two main culprits identified in the literature. Depositors withdraw when they observe that others do so, even when theoretically they should...