This paper tests whether staying ignorant about the negative consequences of one's own actions affects agents' performance in a real effort experiment. We conducted treatments in which subjects' effort either increased only one's own payoff or also increased the donation to a bad charity....

We identify the causal effect of cognitive abilities on economic behavior in an experimental setting. Using a forecasting task with varying cognitive load, we identify the causal effect of working memory on subjects' forecasting performance, while also accounting for the effect of other...

We study reputational herding in financial markets in a laboratory experiment. In the spirit of Dasgupta and Prat (2008), career concerns are introduced in a sequential asset market, where wages for investors are set by subjects in the role of employers. Employers can observe investment...

We investigate the consequences of imperfect data privacy on information acquisition of personal health data. In a game of persuasion with ex-ante symmetric information players decide on whether or not to acquire and reveal information about their personal health status to convince a decision...

Game theory predicts that players make strategic commitments that may appear counter-intuitive. We conducted an experiment to see if people make a counter-intuitive but strategically optimal decision to avoid information. The experiment is based on a sequential Nash demand game in which a...

We experimentally analyze the effects of external interventions such as subsidy and targeting on investment decisions during the intervention and after. We employ a multi-period version of the trust (investment) game (Berg et al., 1995) introducing either the monetary incentives for contribution...

Although understanding preferences for privacy is of great importance to economists, businesses and politicians little is known about the factors that shape the individual willingness to share personal data. This article provides three experimental studies with a total of 470 participants that...

Myopic loss aversion (MLA) has been established as one prominent explanation for the equity premium puzzle. In this paper we address two issues related to the effects of MLA on risky investment decisions. First, we assess the relative impact of feedback frequency and investment flexibility (via...

We examine in an experiment the causes, consequences and possible cures of myopic loss aversion (MLA) for investment behaviour under risk. We find that both, investment horizons and feedback frequency contribute almost equally to the effects of MLA. Longer investment horizons and less frequent...

This paper introduces a new theoretic entity, a nominalist heuristic, defined as a focus on prominent numbers, indices or ratios. Abstractions used in the evaluation stage of decision making typically involve nominalist heuristics that are incompatible with expected utility theory which excludes...