We investigate the relevance of conditional reasoning and belief formation for the occurrence of the winner's curse with the help of two experimental manipulations. First, we compare results from a very simple common-value auction game with results from a transformed version of this game that...

Before a group can take a decision, its members must agree on a mechanism to aggregate individual preferences. In this paper we present the results of an experiment on the influence of private payoff information and the role of the available alternatives on individuals’ mechanism choices in...

To address the impact of regulation on ethical concerns of consumers, we study the example of minimum wages. In our experimental market, consumers have monopsony power, firms set prices and wages, and workers are passive recipients of a wage payment. We find that the consumers exhibit...

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. A project's cost is private information and its value for the designer may vary. In this allocation problem, the selection of projects - both which and how many - is endogenously...

Players may categorize the strategies available to them. In many games there are different ways to categorize one's strategies (different frames) and which ones players use has implications for the outcomes realized. This paper proposes a model of agents who learn which frames to use through...

Experimental evidence from simple distribution games supports the view that some individuals have a concern for the effciency of allocations. This motive could be important for the implementation of economic policy proposals. In a typical lab experiment, however, individuals have much more...

This paper proposes a behavioral model of social learning that unies various forms of inferential reasoning in one hierarchy of types. Iterated best responses that are based on uninformative level-0 play lead to the following of the private information (level-1), to the following of the majority...

In most laboratory experiments concerning prosocial behavior subjects are fully informed how their decision influences the payoff of other players. Outside the laboratory, however, individuals typically have to decide without such detailed knowledge. To asses the effect of information...

The long run price elasticity of healthcare spending is critically important to estimating the cost of provision. However, temporary randomized controlled trials may be confounded by transitory effects. This paper shows evidence of a "deadline effect" - a spike in spending in the final year of...