Access to information via social media is one of the biggest differentiators of public health crises today. During the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak in January 2020, we conducted an experiment in Wuhan, China to assess the impact of viral social media content on pro-social and trust behaviours and preferences towards risk taking with known and unknown probabilities. Prior to the experiment, participants viewed one of two videos that had been widely and anonymously shared on Chinese social media: a central government leader visiting a local hospital and supermarket, or health care volunteers transiting to Wuhan. In a control condition, participants watched a Neutral video, unrelated to the crisis. Viewing one of the leadership or volunteer videos leads to higher levels of pro-sociality and lesser willingness to take risks in an ambiguous situation relative to the control condition. The leadership video, however, induces lower levels of trust. We provide evidence from two post-experiment surveys that the video’s impact on pro-sociality is modulated by influencing the viewer’s affective emotional state.

Experimental asset markets with a constant fundamental value ($\mathrm{F}\mathrm{V}$) have grown in importance in recent years. A methodological examination of the robustness of experimental results in such a setting which has been shown to produce bubbles, however, is lacking. In a laboratory experiment with 280 subjects, we investigate whether specific design features are sufficient to influence experimental results. In detail, we (1) vary the visual representation of the price chart, and (2) provide subjects with full information about the FV process. We find overvaluation and bubble formation to be reduced when trading prices are displayed at the upper end of the price chart. Surprisingly, we do not find any effects when subjects have full information about the FV process.

Consumers typically overstate their intentions to purchase products, compared to actual rates of purchases, a pattern called “hypothetical bias”. In laboratory choice experiments, we measure participants’ visual attention using mousetracking or eye-tracking, while they make hypothetical as well as real purchase decisions. We find that participants spent more time looking both at price and product image prior to making a real “buy” decision than making a real “don’t buy” decision. We demonstrate that including such information about visual attention improves prediction of real buy decisions. This improvement is evident, although small in magnitude, using mousetracking data, but is not evident using eye-tracking data.

It has been observed that, in a variety of tasks, losses have a larger impact on behavior than do gains of equal size. This phenomenon is referred to as loss aversion. It is thought that the negativity bias in behavior is reflected in and potentially causally related to a negativity bias in emotional arousal. We examine skin conductance responses—a psychophysiological marker for emotional arousal—during the anticipation of gains and losses. In contrast to most previous research, gains and losses were separated from each other and symmetric in magnitude. We found that skin conductance responses during the anticipation phase increased with the magnitude of both gains and losses. Contrary to the predictions of the loss aversion hypothesis, the anticipation of a loss did not elicit stronger reactions than the anticipation of a gain of equal size.

This study is a conceptual replication of Kelley & Schmeichel (PLOS ONE 10: e0144228, 2015), which found that thinking about death reduces delay discounting. Unlike the original study, the current study was conducted in an environment where there was a real and tangible mortality threat across the world, that is, COVID-19. Contrary to the findings of the original study, results of the current study revealed that thinking about death increases delay discounting, such that participants who were primed with death thoughts traded “₺200 now” for “₺342.35 three months later,” whereas those in the control condition traded “₺200 now” for “₺319.27 three months later”. The current study also explored the moderating roles of goal orientation and self-esteem in the effect of mortality salience on delay discounting; however, it failed to provide evidence for the moderating roles of these variables.

We use an experiment to evaluate the effects of participatory management on firm performance. Participants are randomly assigned roles as managers or workers in firms that generate output via real effort. To identify the causal effect of participation on effort, workers are exogenously assigned to one of the two treatments: one in which the manager implements a compensation scheme unilaterally or another in which the manager cedes control over compensation to the workers who vote to implement a scheme. We find that output is between seven and twelve percentage points higher in participatory firms.

We present evidence from a natural field experiment designed to shed light on whether individual behavior is consistent with a neoclassical model of utility maximization subject to budget constraints. We do this through the lens of a field experiment on charitable giving. We find that the behavior of at least 80% of individuals, on both the extensive and intensive margins, can be rationalized within a standard neoclassical choice model in which individuals have preferences, defined over own consumption and their contribution towards the charitable good, satisfying the axioms of revealed preference.

stratEst is a software package for strategy frequency estimation in the freely available statistical computing environment R (R Development Core Team in R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, 2022). The package aims at minimizing the start-up costs of running the modern strategy frequency estimation techniques used in experimental economics. Strategy frequency estimation (Stahl and Wilson in J Econ Behav Organ 25: 309–327, 1994; Stahl and Wilson in Games Econ Behav, 10: 218–254, 1995) models the choices of participants in an economic experiment as a finite-mixture of individual decision strategies. The parameters of the model describe the associated behavior of each strategy and its frequency in the data. stratEst provides a convenient and flexible framework for strategy frequency estimation, allowing the user to customize, store and reuse sets of candidate strategies. The package includes useful functions for data processing and simulation, strategy programming, model estimation, parameter testing, model checking, and model selection.

We report data on the experimental articles published from 2000 to 2021 in seven leading general-interest economics journals. We also look at time trends in the characteristics of the published experimental articles, including citations and the nationality of the authors. We find an overall increasing trend in the publication of non-lab experiments in all journals. By contrast, the share of lab experiments has more than halved in the AER and remained low in other Top five journals. The diverging trends for non-lab and lab experiments are not universal as the shares of both have increased in two other high-ranking economics journals (JEEA and EJ). We also observe some heterogeneities in publication, citations, rankings, and locations of authors' affiliations across journals and types of experiments.

This paper specifies the panel data experimental design condition under which ordinary least squares, fixed effects, and random effects estimators yield identical estimates of treatment effects. This condition is relevant to the large body of laboratory experimental research that generates panel data. Although the point estimates and the true standard errors of the estimated average treatment effects are identical across the three estimators, the estimated standard errors differ. A standard F test as well as asymptotic reasoning guide the choice of which estimated standard errors are the appropriate ones to use for statistical inference.

Do people discriminate between men and women when they have the option to punish defectors or reward cooperators? Here, we report on four pre-registered experiments that shed some light on this question. Study 1 (N = 544) shows that people do not discriminate between genders when they have the option to punish (reward) defectors (cooperators) in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma with third-party punishment/reward. Study 2 (N = 253) extends Study 1 to a different method of punishing/rewarding: participants are asked to rate the behaviour of a defector/cooperator on a scale of 1–5 stars. In this case too, we find that people do not discriminate between genders. Study 3a (N = 331) and Study 3b (N = 310) conceptually replicate Study 2 with a slightly different gender manipulation. These latter studies show that, in situations where they do not have specific beliefs about the gender of the defector/cooperator’s partner, neither men nor women discriminate between genders.

Experiments in economics usually provide subjects with starting capital to be used in the experiment. This practice could affect decisions as there is no risk of loss. This phenomenon is known as the house-money effect. In a repeated public goods game, we test for house-money effects by paying subjects in advance an amount they could lose in the experiment. We do not find evidence of a house-money effect over time.

We examine the effects of endogenizing contribution productivity in a repeated public good game. In our experimental treatment, subjects collectively decide (by voting) how much to invest in augmenting the technology for producing the public good, and subsequently make individual voluntary contributions to provision. In the control, contribution productivity is exogenous. Contributions in the two treatments are similar.

We report experiments investigating how experience influences the endowment effect. Our experiments feature endowments which are bundles of unfamiliar consumption goods. We examine how a subject’s willingness to swap items from their endowment is influenced by prior experiences of tasting the goods in question and by prior experiences of choosing between them. We do not find a statistically significant endowment effect in our baseline treatment and, because of this, we are unable to test for an effect of consumption experience. We do find an endowment effect when the endowment is acquired in two instalments and, in this setting, we find some evidence that choice experience increases trading. In a follow-up experiment, we find evidence that the absence of an endowment effect in our baseline treatment is due to subjects being more willing to swap when they do not have to give up the last unit of their endowment.

We replicate Meissner (Exp Econ 19:281–298, 2016), where debt aversion was reported for the first time in an intertemporal consumption and saving problem. While Meissner (2016) uses a German sample, our participants are US undergraduate students. All of the original study’s main findings replicate with similar effect sizes. Additionally, we extend the original analysis by introducing a new individual index of debt aversion, which we use to compare debt aversion across countries. Interestingly, we find no significant differences in debt aversion between the original German and the new US sample. We then test whether debt aversion correlates with individual characteristics such as gender, cognitive reflection ability, and risk aversion. Overall, this paper confirms the importance of debt aversion in intertemporal consumption and saving problems and validates the approach of Meissner (2016).

The present study investigates the framing effect of tax–transfer systems on work effort decisions. We devised two theoretically equivalent treatments—the redistributive tax treatment and the redistributive transfer treatment—and studied subjects’ work effort choices in a novel public goods experiment. We found that subjects chose higher effort levels when redistribution took place via transfers than via taxes. Interestingly, the treatment effect was more pronounced among those with lower cognitive abilities and those who judged the tax–transfer system to be unfair. The results have the potential to offer insight on the debate about the extent to which taxes or transfers should be actively used for redistribution.

We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of deliberation time on behavior under risk and uncertainty. Towards this end we ask our participant to make quick, intuitive evaluations of a number of lotteries and report resulting certainty equivalents. Yet, we invite them to modify these initial decisions, whenever they find, after (additional) deliberation, that they do not precisely represent their preference. Both certainty equivalents are incentivized (a double-response method). The choice of evaluated lotteries allows us to semi-parametrically estimate the value function and the probability weighting function within the paradigm of the cumulative prospect theory. The main finding is that deliberation raises the probability weighting function (reduces pessimism), especially in the case of lotteries involving unknown probabilities.

Dictator game experiments come in three flavors: plain vanilla with strictly dichotomous separation of dictator and recipient roles, an interactive alternative whereby every subject acts in both roles, and a variant thereof with role uncertainty. We add information regarding which of these three protocols was used to data from the leading meta-study by Engel (Exp Econ 14(4):583–610, 2011) and investigate how these variations matter. Our meta-regressions suggest that interactive protocols with role duality compared with standard protocols, in addition to being relevant as a control for other effects, render subjects’ giving less generous but more efficiency-oriented. Our results help organize existing findings in the field and indicate sources of confounds.

For simple prospects routinely used for certainty equivalent elicitation, random expected utility preferences imply a conditional expectation function that can mimic deterministic rank-dependent preferences. That is, a subject with random expected utility preferences can have expected certainty equivalents exactly like those predicted by rank-dependent probability weighting functions of the inverse-s shape discussed by Quiggin (J Econ Behav Organ 3:323–343, 1982) and advocated by Tversky and Kahneman (J Risk Uncertainty 5:297–323, 1992), Prelec (Econometrica 66:497–527, 1998) and other scholars. Certainty equivalents may not nonparametrically identify preferences: Their conditional expectation (and critically, their interpretation) depends on assumptions concerning the source of their variability.

We consider a dictator game experiment in which dictators perform a sequence of giving tasks and taking tasks. The data are used to estimate the parameters of a Stone–Geary utility function over own-payoff and other’s payoff. The econometric model incorporates zero observations (e.g. zero-giving or zero-taking) by applying the Kuhn–Tucker theorem and treating zeros as corner solutions in the dictator’s constrained optimisation problem. The method of maximum simulated likelihood (MSL) is used for estimation. We find that selfishness is significantly lower in taking tasks than in giving tasks, and we attribute this difference to the “cold prickle of taking”.