Whether rationality of economic behavior increases with expected payoffs and decreases with the cognitive cost it takes to formulate an optimal strategy remains an open question. We explore these issues with field data, using individual bids from sealed-bid auctions in which we sold nearly...

We test two recent theories on the subject of charitable fundraising in capital campaigns. Andreoni (1998) predicts that publicly announced seed contributions can increase the total amount of charitable giving in a capital campaign. Bagnoli and Lipman (1989) predict that another technique for...

Field experiments occupy a middle ground between laboratory experiments and naturally occurring field data. The idea is to perform a controlled experiment that captures important characteristics of the real world. Relative to traditional empirical economics, field experiments provide an...