Many tournaments are plagued by sabotage among competitors. Typically, sabotage is welfare-reducing, but from an individual’s perspective an attractive alternative to exerting positive effort. Yet, given its illegal and often immoral nature, sabotage is typically hidden, making it difficult to assess its extent and its victims. Therefore, we use data from Judo World Championships, where a rule ...

We propose a methodology that is generalizable to a broad class of repeated games in order to facilitate operability of belief learning models with repeated-game strategies. The methodology consists of (1) a generalized repeated-game strategy space, (2) a mapping between histories and repeated-game beliefs, and (3) asynchronous updating of repeated-game strategies. We implement the proposed met...

Muslims in France: Identifying a Discriminatory Equilibrium We analyze the assimilation patterns of Muslim immigrants in Western countries with a unique identification strategy. Survey and experimental data collected in France in 2009 reveal that Muslims and rooted French are locked in a sub-optimal equilibrium whereby (i) rooted French exhibit taste-based discrimination against those they are ...

Gender Differences in Risk Aversion and Ambiguity Aversion This paper demonstrates gender differences in risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. It also contributes to a growing literature relating economic preference parameters to psychological measures by asking whether variations in preference parameters among persons, and in particular across genders, can be accounted for by differences in pe...

With increasing attention being paid to inequality and poverty this paper attempts to shed light on mechanisms by which the poor arrive at decisions that are suboptimal and lead to “poverty traps.” Thus, we design a laboratory experiment in which we induce wealth and income differences between subjects to compare their behavior in a simple, two-period life-cycle savings and consumption task tha...

Stability of Time Preferences Individuals frequently face intertemporal decisions. For the purposes of economic analysis, the preference parameters assumed to govern these decisions are generally considered to be stable economic primitives. However, evidence on the stability of time preferences is notably lacking. In a large field study conducted over two years with about 1,400 individuals, tim...

This study investigates experimentally whether people in retrospective are self-aware that they engage in status-seeking behavior. Subjects participated in a real-effort task where effort translated into a donation to a charity. Within-subjects we varied the visibility of their performance (private/public feedback). On average subjects exerted more effort in the public treatment. After the real...

People communicate in economic interactions either aiming to alter material outcomes or because they derive direct satisfaction from expressing. We focus on the latter noninstrumental motivation and find that this less researched aspect of expression has important economic implications. In particular, we experimentally study ex–post verbal expression in a modified Power– to–Take game and docume...

Cooperation problems are at the heart of many everyday situations. In this paper, we propose a very simple and light-handed mechanism to sustain cooperation and test its performance in a rich laboratory environment. The mechanism moderates cooperation by controlling experiences, more specifically, it "manipulates" subjects’ initial beliefs by providing them with selective information about (un)...

Bracketing is a mental procedure about how people deal with multiple tasks. If a decision maker handles all the tasks at the same time, it is called broad bracketing. If she handles the tasks separately, e.g., one or a few tasks each time, it is called narrow bracketing. This paper experimentally investigates the effect of broad versus narrow bracketing in the context of a mini-trust game. The ...