When a company goes public, it is standard practice that the underwriting syndicate allocates more shares than are issued. The underwriter thus holds a short position that it commonly fills by aftermarket trading when market prices fall or, when prices rise, by executing the so-called...

Under weak contract enforcement the trading parties' trust, defined as their belief in other's trustworthiness, appears important for realizing gains from trade. In contrast, under strong contract enforcement beliefs about other's trustworthiness appear less important, suggesting that trust and...

We study paternalistic preferences in two large-scale experiments with participants from the general population in the United States. Spectators decide whether to intervene to prevent a stakeholder, who is mistaken about the choice set, from making a choice that is not aligned with the...

This paper studies whether people can avoid punishment by remaining willfully ignorant about possible negative consequences of their actions for others. We employ a laboratory experiment, using modified dictator games in which a dictator can remain willfully ignorant about the payoff...

This paper analyzes responsibility attributions for outcomes of collective decision making processes. In particular, we ask if decision makers are blamed for being pivotal if they implement an unpopular outcome in a sequential voting process. We conduct an experimental voting game in which...

Cason and Plott (2014) show that subjects’ misconception about the incentive properties of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) value elicitation procedure can generate data patterns that look like - and might thus be misinterpreted as evidence for - preferences constructed from endowments or...

This article studies socially responsible behavior in markets. We develop a laboratory product market in which low-cost production creates a negative externality for third parties, but where alternative production with higher costs mitigates the externality. Our first study, conducted in...