We analyze the Spence education game in experimental markets. We compare a signaling and a screening variant, and we analyze the effect of increasing the number of competing employers from two to three. In all treatments, more efficient workers invest more often in education and employers offer...

The common prior assumption is pervasive in game-theoretic models with incomplete information. This paper investigates experimentally the importance of inducing a common prior in a two-person signaling game. For a specific probability distribution of the sender's type, the long-run behavior...

We confront a representative sample of one 1,102 Dutch individuals with a series of incentivized investment decisions and also elicit their time preferences. There are two treatments that differ in the frequency at which individuals decide about the invested amount. The low frequency treatment...

Approximate truth refers to the principle that border cases should be analyzed by solving generic cases and solving border cases as limits of generic ones (Brennan et al., 2008). Our study experimentally explores whether this conceptual principle is also behaviorally appealing. To do so, we...

Bounded rationality questions backward induction, which however, does not exclude such reasoning when anticipation is easy. In our stochastic (alternating offer) bargaining experiment, there is a certain first-period pie and a known finite deadline. What is uncertain (except for the final...

We experimentally investigate competition in innovation in a patent race scenario. Pairs of subjects compete as seller firms on a duopoly market, engaging in risky search investments. Successful innovation is rewarded through temporary monopoly rents. Throughout the interaction, subjects receive...

Does geographic distance or the perceived social distance between subjects significantly affect proposer and responder behavior in ultimatum bargaining? To answer this question, subjects play a one-shot ultimatum game with three players (proposer, responder, and a passive dummy player) and...

Facing a stochastic market wage, which is independent of their own hiring policy, employers offer contracts specifying fixed wage, revenue share and employment duration. In ongoing employment relations it depends on the treatment whether fixed wages can be only increased or also decreased. Will...

When two or more agents compete for a bonus and the agents' productivity in each of several possible occurrences depends stochastically on (constant) effort, the number of times that are checked to assign the bonus affects the level of un-certainty in the selection process. Uncertainty, in turn,...

Economic theory has evolved without paying proper attention to behavioral approaches, especially to social, economic, and cognitive psychology. This has recently changed by including behavioral economics courses in many doctoral study programs. Although this new development is most welcome, the...