"Increased traceability of food and food ingredients through the agri-food chain has featured in recent industry initiatives in the Canadian livestock sector and is an important facet of the new Canadian Agricultural Policy Framework (APF). While traceability is usually implicitly associated...

This paper reports results from a unique two-stage experiment designed to examine the spillover effects of optimism and pessimism. In stage 1, we induce optimism or pessimism onto subjects by randomly assigning a high or low piece rate for performing a cognitive task. We find that participants...

Some people assign negative values for new products sold on laboratory auction blocks (i.e., irradiated meat). We explore bidding behavior in two Vickrey auctions when people have positive- and negative-induced values for the good. Aggregate bidding in the second-price auction is precise but...

We explore the behavioral consequences of sleep loss and time-of-day (circadian) effects on a particular type of decision making. Subject sleep is monitored for the week prior to a decision experiment, which is then conducted at 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. A validated circadian preference instrument allows...

Classroom experiments examining fairness preferences [Andreoni, J., Miller, J., 2002. Giving according to GARP: an experimental test of the consistency of preferences for Altruism. Econometrica 70 (2), 737-753] were conducted to examine two issues: first, are classroom points a salient reward...

When employers observe imperfect measures of worker effort, theorists typically assume that observed effort is unimodal and symmetrically distributed. Though observable effort may be distributed in different ways within a work day, for example, available field data on these effort distributions...

A two-stage experiment was designed to examine spillover effects of a type of optimism/pessimism. We first exploit cognitive dissonance to induce optimism/pessimism by random assignment of high/low piece rates for performing a task. Subjects receiving the low piece rate are significantly more...

We investigate the consistency and stability of individual risk preferences by slightly manipulating the cognitive resources of subjects through sleepiness. Participants are recruited and randomly assigned to an experiment session at a preferred time of day relative to their diurnal preference...