May 10, Kimberly Wade-Benzoni, Ph.D. – The Egoism and Altruism of Intergenerational Behavior Abstract: Some of the most important issues in society today affect more than one generation of people. In this article, the authors offer a conceptual overview and integration of the research on intergenerational dilemmas—decisions that entail a tradeoff between one’s own self-interest  Continue Reading »

Some markets are ugly. Others work miracles. An article by Vernon L. Smith featured in the Daily Beast. “The Great Recession began in the fourth quarter of 2007. Measured in Depression clock time, 2012 was 1934, when the U.S. economy expanded 7.7 percent. Today such expansion seems remote. Rather, the economy is still stuck in  Continue Reading »

How Product Labeling Killed Some Truly Righteous Weed and Might Even Raise Your Hospital Bill by Megan McArdle In this article, published in the Daily Beast online, Author Megan McArdle uses experiments run by the Economic Science Institute’s Dr. Bart Wilson to discuss how transparency may have unexpected results to a market. Check out the full  Continue Reading »

Apr. 19, Raymond Deneckere, Ph.D. – Multi-Dimensional Screening: A Solution to a Class of Problems Abstract: We develop a general method for solving multi-dimensional screening problems in which the ‘physical’ allocation space is one-dimensional, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of ‘exclusion’ in the optimal mechanism. We illustrate the application of our  Continue Reading »

Apr. 12, Caroline Thomas, Ph.D. – N-Dimensional Colonel Blotto Game with Asymmetric Battlefield Values Abstract: This paper describes a geometrical method for constructing equilibrium distributions in the Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric battlefield values. It generalizes to the n-dimensional case a construction method first described by Gross and Wagner. The proposed method does particularly well  Continue Reading »

Apr. 5, David Cooper, Ph.D. – Ambiguity in Performance Pay: An Online Experiment Abstract: Many incentive plans do not include an explicit mapping between workers’ effort and compensation. Potential employees therefore face both risk and uncertainty when choosing whether to accept an employment contract. Using an online labor market, Amazon Mechanical Turk, we study the  Continue Reading »

Mar. 22, Cary Deck, Ph.D. – Contests with Multiple Targets Bio: Dr. Cary Deck is a professor of economics in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas where he is also the Director of the Behavioral Business Research Laboratory. His research uses controlled laboratory experiments to investigate a wide array  Continue Reading »

Mar. 15, John Roberts, Ph.D. – Does Working From Home Work?  Evidence from a Chinese experiment Abstract: About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000- employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel  Continue Reading »

Mar. 8, Tony Kwasnica, Ph.D. – A Laboratory Comparison of Auctions and Sequential Mechanisms Abstract: When bidders incur a cost to learn their valuations, bidder entry can impact auction performance. Two common selling mechanisms in this environment are an English auction, and a sequential bidding process. Bulow and Klemperer (2009) show, theoretically, that sellers should  Continue Reading »

Why Do We Want Prices in Health Care? by Megan McArdle Feb 27, The Daily Beast Other governments use fiat to set prices in the health care market. I talk to economist Bart Wilson about the potential pitfalls. A couple of days ago I fell to talking about price-setting in health care with a certified  Continue Reading »