Romer (1993) suggests that universities should undertake experiments that would test the value of mandatory attendance for economics courses. He presents evidence showing that those who attended his classes received higher grades on his exams and concluded that ^San important part of the...

Formal education can be improved by transferring responsibility from the teacher to the learner. A simple approach to this is the time contract. Time contracts have been used successfully in nine quasi-experiments but, despite these successes, some educators see this as subversive research.

We all share the desire to improve the learning environment at Wharton and to have students who will be satisfied with this environment. While most of the Wharton Teaching Committee's recommendations are consistent with these aims, I believe that recommendation #1, to 'Establish Minimum...

A literature review suggested that behavioral changes occur more rapidly when the learner assumed responsibility. Natural learning, an approach to help learners assume responsibility, was compared with the traditional strategy in seven field experiments. It produced more than twice as many...

Snapshots from Hell describes a first-year student<92>s experience in the Stanford Master of Business Administration (MBA) program in 1989. Peter Robinson, formerly a speech writer for President Reagan, tells about his experiences in applying to business schools, living with other MBA students,...</92>

We examined the relationships between the research originating at business schools, students^R satisfaction with the schools, and the published ratings of the school^Rs prestige. Research was positively correlated to prestige (where prestige was based on the perceptions of academics, firms, and...

Exploiting small uncertainties on the part of opponents, players in long, finitely repeated games can maintain false reputations that lead to a large variety of equilibrium outcomes. Even cooperation in a finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma is obtainable. Can such false reputations be...

Reinforcement learning has proved quite successful in predicting subjects' adjustment behaviour in repeatedly played simple games. However, reinforcement learning does not predict convergence to the efficient cell in the minimal information game of mutual fate control, while earlier...

Earlier experiments have shown that under little information subjects are hardly able to coordinate even though there are no conflicting interests and subjects are organised in fixed pairs. This is so, even though a simple adjustment process would lead the subjects into the efficient, fair and...

We use an experiment to explore how subjects learn to play against computers which are programmed to follow one of a number of standard learning algorithms. The learning theories are (unbeknown to subjects) a best response process, fictitious play, imitation, reinforcement learning, and a trial...