While the debate on how economic agents form expectations and how these expectationsshould be modelled has been key to modern macroeconomics, money illusion has been ananathema to macroeconomists until recently. The rational expectations revolution in the1970's thoroughly banned the study of...

For decades economists have considered money illusion aslargely irrelevant. Here we show, however, that money illusion haspowerful effects on equilibrium selection. If we represent payoffs innominal terms almost all subjects play at or close to an inefficientequilibrium whereas if we lift the...

There is abundant evidence that many individuals violate the rationality assumptions routinely made in economics. However, powerful evidence also indicates that violations of individual rationality do not necessarily refute the aggregate predictions of standard economic models that assume full...

The evidence from many experiments suggests that people are heterogeneous with regard to their abilities to make rational, forward looking, decisions. This raises the question when the rational types are decisive for aggregate outcomes and when the boundedly rational types shape aggregate...

Although cooperation can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes, cooperative actions only pay off for the individual if others can be trusted to cooperate as well. Identifying trustworthy interaction partners is therefore a central challenge in human social life. How do people navigate this...

Who commits crime? Theoretically, risk-tolerant and impatient people are more likely to commit crime because they care less about the risks of apprehension and punishment. By linking experimental data on risk tolerance and impatience of young men to administrative crime records, we find...

The widespread use of markets leads to unprecedented material well-being in many societies. We study whether market interaction, as a side effect, erodes moral values. In an influential paper, Falk and Szech (2013) provide experimental data that seem to suggest that “market interaction erodes...

We study subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms that have been proposed as a solution to incomplete contracting problems. We show that these mechanisms, which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that impose large fines for lying and the inappropriate use of arbitration,...

When choice is stochastic, revealed preference analysis often relies on random utility models. However, it is impossible to infer preferenceswithout assumptions on the distribution of utility noise. We show that this difficulty can be overcome by using response time data. A simple condition on...

Transitivity is perhaps the most fundamental choice axiom and, therefore, almost all economic models assume that preferences are transitive. The empirical literature has regularly documented violations of transitivity, but these violations pose little problem as long as they are simply a result...