This paper argues that the acceptance of two recent methodological advances in economics, namely game theory and laboratory experimentation, was affected by the history dependence constraining the formalization of economics. After an early period in which the two methods were coolly received by...

This paper reports on a laboratory study that examined the influence of experimenter bias in the investment game. Specifically we explored the effect of changing the gender of the experimenter and compared it with the double blind treatment. Our findings show that the presence of a female...

In the 1950s before Kahneman and Tversky showed how behavioral economics could bring economics and psychology into a unified framework, a social psychologist, Sidney Siegel, entered the realm of economics and laid the foundation of experimental economics. This paper gives an assessment of...

This paper analyses gender differences in the trust game. Our experiment implements the triadic design proposed by Cox (2004) to discriminate between transfers resulting from trust or trustworthiness and transfers resulting from altruistic preferences. We observe that women exhibit a higher...

The theory of drift (Binmore and Samuelson 1999) concerns equilibrium selection in which second-order disturbances may have first-order effects in the emergence of one equilibrium over the other. We provided experimental evidence with human players supporting the model in Caminati, Innocenti and...

This study applies experimental methods to analyze travel mode choice. Two different scenarios are considered. In the first scenario, subjects have to decide whether to commute by car or by metro. Metro costs are fixed, while car costs are uncertain and determined by the joint effect of casual...

This paper provides laboratory evidence on the effect of psychological pressure in competitive environments. In our experiment, we analyze a setup of sequential tournaments, in which participants are matched in pairs and experience a kind of pressure that, as in most real world professional...

We analyze more than 1,250,000 bets on Italian soccer league matches. Our findings show that bettors do not improve their performance as the season progresses. We obtain evidence that early bettors, who place bets the days before the match, performed better then late bettors, who place bets on...