Charitable giving in the U.S. totaled more than $300 billion in 2009, amounting to about 2% of GDP.These organizations depend on fundraising activities to generate donations from individuals who provide three-quarters of the funding for charitable organizations.Despite the size and scope of...

Shelling (1960) among others have argued that contributions to public goods may be larger if people spread their contributions and give one small contribution at a time. Examining a threshold public good environment, Marx and Matthews (2000) show that multiple rounds may secure a provision level...

This dissertation consists of three empirical chapters. The first chapter examines the extent to which real-world agents are rational in making quantitative expectations, an issue over which there is much debate. In this chapter dynamic models for new plant-level survey data are estimated in...

My dissertation uses game theoretical and experimental approaches to study how individual's behavior in different informational environments affects economic outcomes and motivations for charitable giving. Chapter 2 "Bargaining with Uncertain Value Distributions" studies a bargaining model in...

This paper analyzes a fully funded social security system under the assumption that agents face temptation issues. Agents are required to save through individually managed Personal Security Accounts without, and with mandatory annuitization. When the analysis is restricted to CRRA preferences...

This dissertation consists of the three independent chapters in the areas of Public Economics and Microeconomic Theory. The first two chapters use experimental and computational techniques to address two important behavioral issues in Public Economics. In particular, the first chapter (with Lise...