We test whether anchoring affects people’s elicited valuations for a bottle of wine in individual decision-making and in markets. We anchor subjects by asking them if they are willing to sell a bottle of wine for a transparently uninformative random price. We elicit subjects’ Willingness-To-Accept for the bottle before and after the market. Subjects participate in a double auction market either in a small or a large trading group. The variance in subjects’ Willingness-To-Accept shrinks within trading groups. Our evidence supports the idea that markets have the potential to diminish anchoring effects. However, the market is not needed: our anchoring manipulation failed in a large sample. In a concise meta-analysis, we identify the circumstances under which anchoring effects of preferences can be expected.

Studying the likelihood that individuals cheat requires a valid statistical measure of dishonesty. We develop an easy empirical method to measure and compare lying behavior within and across studies to correct for sampling errors. This method estimates the full distribution of lying when agents privately observe the outcome of a random process (e.g., die roll) and can misreport what they observed. It provides a precise estimate of the mean and confidence interval (offering lower and upper bounds on the proportion of people lying) over the full distribution, allowing for a vast range of statistical inferences not generally available with the existing methods.

Models of multilateral bargaining predict that agents would vote solely based on the share they are offered and that their vote is determined by whether that share is at least as high as the continuation value (CV) of the game. The standard experiment investigating behavior in multilateral bargaining is not well designed to determine if that is the case. Our experiment makes three changes to the typical design: it introduces substantial variation in the CV (using a within-subjects design and varying the discount factor), it generates variability in offers using computer-generated offers while retaining the equilibrium of the original game, and it uses belief elicitation. These changes allow us to consider whether behavioral voting rules that are independent of the CV or factors besides one’s own share are important to voting decisions. We find that the main determinant of votes is the share one is offered, but that when offers are believed to come from another participant, a proposal is less likely to be approved if the proposer tries to take a lot for himself. Nonetheless, the equilibrium voting rule, which is based on the CV of the game organizes choices better than behavioral rules that are independent of the CV.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of peer punishment in non-linear social dilemmas and replicates Cason and Gangadharan (Exp Econ 18:66–88, 2015). The contribution of this replication is that cooperation is quantified across payoff equivalent, strategically symmetric public good and common pool resource experiments. Results suggest that the cooperation-inducing effect of peer punishment is statistically equivalent across conditions. Despite this increase in cooperation, earnings are significantly lower than in the absence of punishment. Institutional features which improve the effectiveness of peer punishment in linear public good experiments may, similarly, make self-governance possible in more complex social dilemmas.

Households are frequently subject to income and asset shocks. We performed a lab experiment, inducing losses on a real effort task, after which we measured cognitive performance, loss aversion and cheating behavior. We found that asset losses, but not income losses, act as a cognitive load, by decreasing accuracy and increasing response times. We did not detect any change in dishonesty or loss aversion.

The Dictator Game has been a helpful tool to study whether men or women are more generous. But recent work suggests that motivations other than generosity also influence behavior in this game. Image concerns and expectations management may cause dictators to “give reluctantly”; that is, to share money with the recipient if asked to, but to renege on their gifts if they can do so without being detected. We provide evidence from two separate experiments that females are more likely than males to give reluctantly in the Dictator Game. After accounting for retraction of gifts, males and females transfer similar amounts to the recipient in expectation. The results suggest that gender differences in non-payoff-related motivations may play a role in producing gender differences in giving in the Dictator Game.

Betrayal aversion has been operationalized as the evidence that subjects demand a higher risk premium to take social risks compared to natural risks. This evidence has been first shown by Bohnet and Zeckhauser (J Econ Behav 98:294–310, 2004) using an adaptation of the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak mechanism (BDM, Becker et al. Behav Sci 9:226–232, 1964). We compare their implementation of the BDM mechanism with a new version designed to facilitate subjects’ comprehension. We find that, although the two versions produce different distributions of values, the size of betrayal aversion, measured as an average treatment difference between social and natural risk settings, is not different across the two versions. We further show that our implementation is preferable to use in practice as it reduces substantially subjects’ mistakes and the likelihood of noisy valuations.

Statistical power is an important detail to consider in the design phase of any experiment. This paper serves as a reference for experimental economists on power calculations. We synthesize many of the questions and issues frequently brought up regarding power calculations and the literature that surrounds that. We provide practical coded examples and tools available for calculating power, and suggest when and how to report power calculations in published studies.

We study the effect on coordination in a minimum-effort game of a leader’s gender depending on whether the leader is democratically elected or is randomly selected. Leaders use non-binding messages to try to convince followers to coordinate on the Pareto-efficient equilibrium. We find that teams with elected leaders coordinate on higher effort levels. Initially, the benefits of being elected are captured solely by male leaders. However, this gender difference disappears with repeated interaction because unsuccessful male leaders are reelected more often than unsuccessful female leaders.

Economists conducting laboratory experiments on cooperation and peer punishment find that a non-negligible minority of punishments is directed at cooperators rather than free riders. Such punishments have been categorized as ‘perverse’ or ‘antisocial,’ using definitions that partially overlap, but not entirely so. Which approach better identifies punishment that discourages cooperation? We analyze the data from 16 sites studied by Herrmann et al. (Science 319(5868):1362–1367, 2008) and find that when subjects are uninformed about who punished them, the recipient’s contribution relative to the group average (whether it is ‘perverse’) is a better predictor of negative impact on contribution than is her contribution relative to the punisher’s (whether it is ‘antisocial’). Regression estimates nevertheless suggest that punished subjects attempt to take relative contribution of punisher into account even if only by conjecture.

We systematically investigate prisoner’s dilemma and dictator games with valence framing. We find that give versus take frames influence subjects’ behavior and beliefs in the prisoner’s dilemma games but not in the dictator games. We conclude that valence framing has a stronger impact on behavior in strategic interactions, i.e., in the prisoner’s dilemma game, than in allocation tasks without strategic interaction, i.e., in the dictator game.

This study investigates whether individuals engage in prosocial behavior when it requires an investment of their time, but not money. In a laboratory experiment with rigorous anonymity arrangements, senders receive their payoff at the beginning. They may then engage in a tedious task to increase the earnings of exogenously disadvantaged recipients who otherwise receive no earnings. We find that senders are willing to sacrifice time to benefit recipients. Whether or not the recipient is present in the laboratory during the working time does not alter this decision. However, in a treatment variation some senders also display antisocial behavior.

Protocol analysis, in the form of concurrent verbal ‘thinking aloud’ reports, is a method of collecting and analyzing data about cognitive processes. This approach can help economists in evaluating competing theories of behavior and in categorizing heterogeneity of thinking patterns. As a proof of concept, I tested this method in the context of a guessing game. I found that concurrent think aloud protocols can inform us about individual’s thought processes without affecting decisions. The method allowed me to identify game theoretic thinking and heterogeneous approaches to unravelling the guessing game. The think aloud protocol is inexpensive and scalable, and it is a useful tool for identifying empirical regularities regarding decision processes.

We report results from a replication of Solnick (Econ Inq 39(2):189, 2001), which finds using an ultimatum game that, in relation to males, more is demanded from female proposers and less is offered to female responders. We conduct Solnick’s (2001) game using participants from a large US university and a large Chinese university. We find little evidence of gender differences across proposer and responder decisions in both locations.

We examine the ability of eye movement data to help understand the determinants of decision-making over risky prospects. We start with structural models of choice under risk, and use that structure to inform what we identify from the use of process data in addition to choice data. We find that information on eye movements does significantly affect the extent and nature of probability weighting behavior. Our structural model allows us to show the pathway of the effect, rather than simply identifying a reduced form effect. This insight should be of importance for the normative design of choice mechanisms for risky products. We also show that decision-response duration is no substitute for the richer information provided by eye-tracking.

By means of a laboratory experiment, Rubin and Sheremeta (Manag Sci 62(4):985–999, 2016), study a bonus-version of the gift-exchange game, including two treatment variations. First they vary whether the effort provided by the agent directly translates into output for the principal, or whether it is distorted by a shock. Second, for the condition with a shock they vary whether the shock is observed by the principal, or not. The authors’ main findings are that (1) the introduction of an unobservable shock significantly reduces welfare; and (2) informing the principal about the size of the shock does not restore gift-exchange. In a replication study we largely reproduce finding (1), but we fail to confirm finding (2). Our data suggests that small behavioral differences in the initial rounds lead to a hysteresis effect that is responsible for the differences in results across studies.

The high rewards people desire are often unlikely. Here, we investigated whether decision-makers exploit such ecological correlations between risks and rewards to simplify their information processing. In a learning phase, participants were exposed to options in which risks and rewards were negatively correlated, positively correlated, or uncorrelated. In a subsequent risky choice task, where the emphasis was on making either a ‘fast’ or the ‘best’ possible choice, participants’ eye movements were tracked. The changes in the number, distribution, and direction of eye fixations in ‘fast’ trials did not differ between the risk–reward conditions. In ‘best’ trials, however, participants in the negatively correlated condition lowered their evidence threshold, responded faster, and deviated from expected value maximization more than in the other risk–reward conditions. The results underscore how conclusions about people’s cognitive processing in risky choice can depend on risk–reward structures, an often neglected environmental property.

This paper studies the impact of human subjects in the role of a seller on bidding in experimental second-price auctions. Overbidding is a robust finding in second-price auctions, and spite among bidders has been advanced as an explanation. If spite extends to the seller, then the absence of human sellers who receive the auction revenue may bias upwards the bidding behavior in existing experimental auctions. We derive the equilibrium bidding function in a model where bidders have preferences regarding both the payoffs of other bidders and the seller’s revenue. Overbidding is optimal when buyers are spiteful only towards other buyers. However, optimal bids are lower and potentially even truthful when spite extends to the seller. We experimentally test the model predictions by exogenously varying the presence of human subjects in the roles of the seller and competing bidders. We do not detect a systematic effect of the presence of a human seller on overbidding. We conclude that overbidding is not an artefact of the standard experimental implementation of second-price auctions in which human sellers are absent.

The personal experience of events such as financial crises and natural disasters can alter economic preferences. We administered a repeated cross-sectional preference survey during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, collecting three bi-weekly samples from participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The survey elicits economic preferences, self-reported fear of the pandemic, and beliefs about economic and health consequences. Preferences varied over time and across regions, and self-reported fear of the pandemic explains this variation. These findings suggest caution about the generalizability of some types of experimental work during times of heightened fear.