Oct. 11, David Malueg, Ph.D. – The Best-Shot All-Pay (Group) Auction with Complete Information Abstract : We analyze an all-pay group contest problem in which individual members’ efforts are aggregated via the best-shot technology and the prize is a public good for the winning group. The interplay of within-group free-riding and across-group competition allows for
September 6, Michel Regenwetter, Ph.D. – Random Preference and Distribution-free Random Utility For more information on the IFREE/ESI Lecture Series, please visit our website.
The Argyros School of Business and Economics was ranked #1 in the field of Experimental Economics based on citations in July, according to RePEc. According to its website, the ranking is based on data about authors who have registered with the RePEc Author Service , institutions listed on EDIRC , bibliographic data collected by RePEc
What’s a Spontaneous? At the beginning of each semester, I always have the same conversation. “Hey Mike, what classes are you taking?” Usually, I reply with a boilerplate list of regular law school classes, “I got lumped into professional responsibility, corporations, federal taxation, and evidence.” That’s a regular law school semester. But this year…it was
How Do Societies Avoid Collapse? Featured on The Property and Environment Research Center Blog, Friday, June 7, 2013 Economic research has long been subject to the same pitfall: it lacks a laboratory in which to carry out simple experiments. Unlike sciences such as physics or chemistry, economic data are messy, imperfectly measured, and affected by
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
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
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
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
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
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
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