High rates of divorce in western society have prompted much research on the repercussions for well-being and the economy. Yet little is known about the important topic of whether parental divorce has deleterious consequences upon adult children. By combining experimental and econometric survey-based evidence, this study attempts to provide an answer. Under controlled conditions, it measures university students’ subjective well-being and productivity (in a standardized laboratory task). It finds no evidence that either of these is negatively associated with recent parental divorce. If anything, happiness and productivity appear to be slightly greater, particularly among males, if their parents have divorced. Using longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey—to control for so-called fixed effects—we then cross-check this result, and confirm the same finding, on various random samples of young British adults.

We propose a novel experimental method that disentangles strategically- and non-strategically-motivated behavior. We apply it to an indefinitely-repeated prisoner's dilemma game to observe simultaneously how the same individual behaves in situations with future interaction and in situations with no future interaction, while controlling for expectations. This method allows us to determine the extent to which strategically-cooperating individuals are responsible for the observed pattern of cooperation in experiments with repeated interaction, including the so-called endgame effect. Our results indicate that the most common motive for cooperation in repeated games is strategic.

We report on sealed-bid second-price auctions that we conducted on the Internet using subjects with substantial prior experience: they were highly experienced participants in eBay auctions. Unlike the novice bidders in previous (laboratory) experiments, the experienced bidders exhibited no greater tendency to overbid than to underbid. However, even subjects with substantial prior experience tended not to bid their values, suggesting that the non-optimal bidding of novice subjects is robust to substantial experience in non-experimental auctions. We found that auction revenue was not significantly different from the expected revenue the auction would generate if bidders bid their values. Auction efficiency, as measured by the percentage of surplus captured, was substantially lower in our SPAs than in previous laboratory experiments.

The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children's human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses on cognitive skills as determinants of human capital, it neglects non-cognitive skills. We analyze data from economic experiments with preschoolers and their mothers to investigate whether child health can explain developmental gaps in children's non-cognitive skills. Our measure for children's non-cognitive skills is their willingness to compete with others. Our findings suggest that health problems are negatively related to children's willingness to compete and that the effect of health on competitiveness differs with socioeconomic background. Health has a strongly negative effect in our sub-sample with low socio-economic background, whereas there is no effect in our sub-sample with high socio-economic background.

This paper presents the results from a minimum-effort game in which individuals can observe the choices of others in real time. We find that under perfect monitoring almost all groups coordinate at the payoff-dominant equilibrium. However, when individuals can only observe the actions of their immediate neighbors in a circle network, monitoring improves neither coordination nor efficiency relative to a baseline treatment without real-time monitoring. We argue that the inefficacy of imperfect monitoring is due to information uncertainty, that is, uncertainty about the correct interpretation of a neighbor's actions. Information uncertainty prevents individuals from inferring safely that their group has managed to coordinate from the available information.

In 1988 Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (henceforth SSW) introduced a very influential model to test the efficiency of experimental asset markets. They and many subsequent studies observe that bubbles are robust to many treatment changes. Instead, bubbles are avoided only when subjects are experienced in the same setting, when the dividend-process is experienced by subjects beforehand, or when the fundamental value-process (FV) is presented in a well understandable context to reduce subjects’ confusion. We extend this line of research and show that even marginal changes in the experimental instructions/procedure can eliminate bubbles in the SSW-model. In particular, we show that mispricing is significantly reduced and overvaluation is eliminated completely (i) when the fundamental value process is displayed in a graph instead of a table or (ii) when subjects are asked about the current fundamental value at the beginning of each period. From a questionnaire conducted at the end of the experiment we infer that these treatment changes help to improve subjects’ understanding of the FV-process. We conclude that all bubble reducing factors have one common feature: they allow subjects to understand the non-intuitive declining FV-process of the SSW-model better and thus reduce subjects’ confusion about the FV-process.

This study investigates whether market composition affects individual bidding and the aggregate market in first-price sealed-bid common-value auctions. It compares all-inexperienced markets with only inexperienced bidders, all-experienced markets with only experienced bidders, and mixed markets with both types. On average, there is no market-composition effect for both experienced and inexperienced bidders. When controlling for gender, a market-composition effect appears for inexperienced subjects: Men bid more aggressively in mixed than in all-inexperienced markets, and women bid more aggressively in all-inexperienced markets. On the aggregate level, the all-inexperienced market is the most aggressive with highest winning bids; the all-experienced market is the least aggressive. The mixed market is in between: Both experienced and inexperienced win auctions in this market, but experienced bidders win less auctions than they should.

We present a new experimental evidence of how framing affects decisions in the context of a lottery choice experiment for measuring risk aversion. We investigate framing effects by replicating the Holt and Laury's (Am. Econ. Rev. 92:1644-1655, 2002) procedure for measuring risk aversion under various frames. We first examine treatments where participants are confronted with the 10 decisions to be made either simultaneously or sequentially. The second treatment variable is the order of appearance of the ten lottery pairs. Probabilities of winning are ranked either in increasing, decreasing, or in random order. Lastly, payoffs were increased by a factor of ten in additional treatments. The rate of inconsistencies was significantly higher in sequential than in simultaneous treatment, in increasing and random than in decreasing treatment. Both experience and salient incentives induce a dramatic decrease in inconsistent behaviors. On the other hand, risk aversion was significantly higher in sequential than in simultaneous treatment, in decreasing and random than in increasing treatment, in high than in low payoff condition. These findings suggest that subjects use available information which has no value for normative theories, like throwing a glance at the whole connected set of pairwise choices before making each decision in a connected set of lottery pairs.

Simulating a real world environment is of utmost importance for achieving accurate and meaningful results in experimental economics. Offering monetary incentives is a common method of creating this environment. In general, experimenters provide the rewards at the time of experiment. In this paper, we argue that receiving the reward at the time of the experiment may lead participants to make decisions as if the money they are using were not their own. To solve this problem, we devised a “prepaid mechanism” that encourages participants to use the money as if it were their own.

We introduce non-enforceable property rights over a bargaining surplus in a dictator game with production, where the agent's effort is differentially rewarded and subsequently determines the size of the surplus. Using experimental data, we elicit individual preferences over the egalitarian, accountability and libertarian principles and provide evidence to support the inability of these justice principles to individually account for the observed behavior. We show that the justice principle that can be used to explain dictators’ choices depends on whether dictators are paid more or less than recipients for their effort. Our findings suggest that dictators do employ justice principles in self-serving ways and choose in each context the justice principle that maximizes their financial payoffs.

In this paper we study the belief formation processes of a group of outside observers making predictions about the actions of a player involved in a repeated game. We document four main results. First, there is substantial heterogeneity in the accuracy of our observers, with average accuracy being quite poor. Second, while there is no difference between the most and the least accurate observer in their initial beliefs, there are striking differences in their belief updating rules. The most accurate observers have a well-formulated model of player behavior, are good at best responding and quickly incorporate new information to their beliefs. The worst observers behave in an opposite manner on all three fronts. Third, when the game does not converge, subjects look beyond historical actions to make predictions and place more emphasis on forgone payoffs. Finally, we document that a “collective wisdom” emerges when our data are pooled across subjects and analyzed. Specifically, the accuracy of the group estimates becomes much higher than that of the average observer.

Members of organizations are often called upon to trust others and to reciprocate trust while at the same time competing for bonuses or promotions. We suggest that competition affects trust not only within dyads including direct competitors, but also between individuals who do not compete against each other. We test this idea in a trust game where trustors and trustees are rewarded based either on their absolute performance or on how well they do relative to players from other dyads. In Experiment 1, we show that competition among trustors significantly increases trust. Competition among trustees decreases trustworthiness, but trustors do not anticipate this effect. In Experiment 2, we additionally show that the increase in trust under competition is caused by a combination of increased risk taking and lower sensitivity to non-financial concerns specific to trust interactions. Our results suggest that tournament incentives might have a “blinding effect” on considerations such as betrayal and inequality aversion.

Several papers have documented that when subjects play with standard laboratory “endowments” they make less self-interested choices than when they use money they have either earned through a laboratory task or brought from outside the lab. In the context of a charitable giving experiment we decompose this into two common artifacts of the laboratory: the intangibility of money (or experimental currency units) promised on a computer screen relative to cash in hand, and the distinct treatment of random “windfall” gains relative to earned money. While both effects are found to be significant in non-parametric tests, the former effect, which has been neglected in previous studies, has a stronger impact on total donations, while the latter effect has a greater impact on the probability of donating. These results have clear implications for experimental design, and also suggest that the availability of more abstract payment methods may increase other-regarding behavior in the field.