This article presents the results of an experiment designed to test theoretical predictions about the impact of public compensation schemes and ambiguity on insurance and self-insurance decisions. Consistent with theory, we find that government assistance significantly reduces willingness to pay...

Can a social norm of trust and reciprocity emerge among strangers? We investigate this question by examining behavior in an experiment where subjects repeatedly play a two-player binary ―trust‖ game. Players are randomly and anonymously paired with one another in each period. The...

If payoffs are tickets for binary lotteries, which involve only two money prizes, then rationality requires expected value maximization in tickets. This payoff scheme was increasingly used to induce risk neutrality in experiments. The experiment presented here involved lottery choice and...

This experiment explores whether individuals know that other people are biased. We confirm that overestimation of abilities is a pervasive problem, but observe that most people are not aware of it, i.e. they think others are unbiased. We investigate several explanations for this result. As a...

The paper presents the concept of an "imitation equilibrium" and explores it in the context of some simple oligopoly models. The concept applies to normal form games enriched by a "reference structure" specifying a "reference group" for every player. The reference group is a set of other...

Extensive field evidence shows individuals’ decisions in settings involving choice under uncertainty (e.g. savings and investment choices) depend on the decisions of their peers. One hypothesized cause of peer group effects is social interaction effects: an individual’s utility from an...

In the US tradable SO2 permit scheme 97.2 per cent of the permits are grandfathered annually to electricity utilities. The remaining 2.8 per cent are withheld and offered for sale at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) auction. Also, the electricity utilities may tender permits for sale...

We develop a model of strategic contractual incompleteness that identifies conditions under which principals might omit even costlessly verifiable terms. We then use experiments to test comparative statics predictions of the model. While it is well known that verifiability imperfections can...

We study the relationship between the cognitive load manipulation and strategic sophistication. The cognitive load manipulation is designed to reduce the subject's cognitive resources which are available for deliberation on a choice. In our experiment, subjects are placed under a large cognitive...

We study the relationship between the cognitive load manipulation and strategic sophistication. The cognitive load manipulation is designed to reduce the subject's cognitive resources that are available for deliberation on a choice. In our experiment, subjects are placed under a high cognitive...