Charitable lotteries represent one of today's most popular fund-raising schemes. This study begins by developing theory examining the optimal design of a charitable lottery. We show that any prize distribution is only optimal for a group of n symmetric agents with given risk preference. However,...

Motivated by both prior experimental work and by field observations, we consider the performance of two different sealed bid versions of the silent auction. These are important institutional alternatives to the more familiar ascending price silent auction. In a new series of laboratory...

Field experiments have raised important issues of interpretation of bargaining behavior. There is evidence that bargaining behavior appears to vary across groups of populations, such as nationality, ethnicity and sex. Differences have been observed with respect to initial behavior and with...

This paper demonstrates how economic field experiments may offer researchers a method to quickly assess policy outcomes that otherwise are difficult to measure. We compare lottery winners to losers of a privately run educational voucher program to measure the program’s effect on confidence. We...

To investigate the external validity of Ultimatum and Dictator game behavior we conduct experiments in field settings with naturally occurring variation in “social framing.” Our participants are students at Middlebury College, non-traditional students at Kansas City Kansas Community College...

We explore the predictive capacity of short-horizon time preference decisions for long-horizon investment decisions. We use experimental evidence from a sample of Canadian working poor. Each subject made a set of decisions trading off present and future amounts of money. Decisions involved both...

We discuss the following three themes on the use of field experiments to study economic development: (1) We summarize the arguments for and against using experiments to gather behavioral data in the field; (2) We argue and illustrate that field experiments can provide data on behavior that can be...

The results of standard lab experiments have long been questioned because of the convenience samples of subjects they typically employ and the abstract nature of the lab settings. These two characteristics of experimental economics, it is argued, are the key factors that endanger the external...