We examine the value added of tournaments that compare the predictive power of behavioral models. The advantages and disadvantages of this particular method have not been systematically discussed in the literature; here we aspire to do so. We conclude that tournaments are a useful addition to our...

Widely accepted as a low-cost, fast-turnaround solution with acceptable validity, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is increasingly being used to source participants for academic studies. Yet two commonly raised concerns remain: the presence of quasi-professional respondents, or...

The present article builds on a background paper that was commissioned for a “Witness Seminar” in 2010 that had a dozen prominent experimental economists -- witnesses, indeed -- discuss the origin and evolution of experimental economics. Rather than providing a history of the experimental...

Null Hypothesis Significance Testing has been widely used in the experimental economics literature. Typically, attention is restricted to type-I-errors. We demonstrate that not taking type-II errors into account is problematic. We also provide evidence, for one prominent area in experimental...

We study how donors decide which charity to give to. To this end, we construct a theoretical model that clarifies the conditions in which the stand-alone benefit from giving, price of giving, and cost of information acquisition inform giving decisions. The model shows that giving decisions are...

The literature on dictator [D] and joy-of-destruction [JoD] games demonstrates that people can be nice and nasty. We study, by way of an experiment with between-subjects and within-subjects features, to what extent behaviors are context dependent and consistent. We find that, for one-shot D and...

In this paper, we reproduce Engel’s (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments using his data, and then replicate it using our own data. We find that Engel’s (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments is quite robust. We show that meta-analyses of dictator game experiments depend to...

Luckman et al. (2018) experimentally tested the conjecture that a single model of risky intertemporal choice can account for both risky and intertemporal choices, and under the conditions of their experiment, found evidence supporting it. Given the existing literature, that is a remarkable...

Coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria have attracted major theoretical attention over the past two decades. Two early path-breaking sets of experimental studies were widely interpreted as suggesting that coordination failure is a common phenomenon in the laboratory. We identify the...

We provide a game-theoretic model of academic organizations, focusing on the strategic interaction of prototypical overseers, administrators, and professors. By identifying key principal-agent games routinely played in colleges and universities, we begin to unpack the black box typically used to...