The common prior assumption justifies private beliefs as posterior probabilities when updatinga common prior based on individual information. Common priors are pervasive in most economicmodels of incomplete information and oligopoly models with asymmetrically informed firms. Wedispose of the...

This paper examines the occurrence and fragility of information cascades in laboratory experiments.One group of low informed subjects make predictions in sequence. In a matchedpairs design, another set of high informed subjects observe the decisions of the first group andmake predictions....

This paper investigates market failures due to strategic delays. We test experimentally a discrete model of dynamic investment, where two privately informed agents have an option to invest at the time of their choice in the presence of waiting costs. The equilibrium outcome of ourexperimental...

The employment relationship is characterized by incomplete contracts. Labor contracts often take the form of a fixed wage without explicit performance incentives meaning that workers have a large degree of discretion over effort levels. As a consequence, an employee’s general jobattitude...

We consider a modi¯ed pure public good game characterized by a pre-play negotiation stage, onwhich pairs of players can form binding cooperation commitments. As the introduced mecha-nism only supports pairwise rather than more inclusive commitments, it does not implement thee±cient outcome. We...

We study sequential parimutuel betting markets with asymmetrically informed bettors, usingan experimental approach. In one treatment, groups of eight participants play twenty repetitionsof a sequential betting game. The second treatment is identical, except that bettors are observedby other...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped to bring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics. Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choice tradition and, indirectly, of behaviorism we...

Game and decision theory start from rather strong premises. Preferences, represented by utilities, beliefs represented by probabilities, common knowledge and symmetric rationality as background assumptions are treated as 'given.' A richer language enabling us to capture the process leading to...

In two-person generosity games the proposer's agreement payoffis exogenously given whereas that of the responder is endogenouslydetermined by the proposer's choice of the pie size. Earlier resultsfor two-person generosity games show that participants seem to caremore for eciency than for equity....

We study ultimatum and dictator experiments where the first moverchooses the amount of money to be distributed between the playerswithin a given interval, knowing that her own share is fixed. Thus, thefirst mover is faced with scarcity, but not with the typical trade-off betweenher own and the...