Originally, behavioral law and economics was an exercise in exploring the implications of key findings from behavioral economics (and psychology) for the analysis and reform of legal institutions. Yet as the new discipline matures, it increasingly replaces foreign evidence by fresh evidence, directly targeted to the legal research question. This chapter surveys the key methods: field evidence, ...

We test the implications of ambiguity aversion in a principal-agent problem with multiple agents. Models of ambiguity aversion suggest that, under ambiguity, comparative compensation schemes may become more attractive than independent wage contracts. We test this by presenting agents with a choice between comparative reward schemes and independent contracts, which are designed such that under u...

Social Identity and Inequality: The Impact of China’s Hukou System We conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals’ response to economic incentives. We focus on China’s household registration (hukou) system which favors urban residents and discriminates against rural residents in resource allocation. Our results indicate that making individual...

Strategic Behavior across Gender: A Comparison of Female and Male Expert Chess Players This paper aims to measure differences in risk behavior among expert chess players. The study employs a panel data set on international chess with 1.4 million games recorded over a period of 11 years. The structure of the data set allows us to use individual fixed-effect estimations to control for aspects suc...

Revealed preference theory offers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function that the choices maximize. We conduct a large-scale field experiment that enables us to test for consistency with utility maximization. We find that high-income and high-education subjects display greater levels of consistency than low-income and low-educ...

We find a subtle but substantial bias in a standard measure of the conditional dependence of present outcomes on streaks of past outcomes in sequential data. The mechanism is driven by a form of selection bias, which leads to an underestimate of the true conditional probability of a given outcome when conditioning on prior outcomes of the same kind. The biased measure has been used prominently ...

We experimentally investigate a finitely repeated public good game with varying partners. Within each period, participants are pairwise matched and contribute simultaneously. Participants are informed about contributions and each participant evaluates her partner’s contribution. At the beginning of the next period, participants are re-matched and, except for the two control treatments, receive ...

We explore the behavior of losers of promotion tournaments after the tournament is concluded. We do so through the use of an experiment in which we vary the design of the promotion tournament to determine how tournament design affects post tournament effort. We provide a theoretical model demonstrating two possible effects from the tournaments which are strategic sabotage and the possibility th...

where α, γ, ω are given real constants. Equation (1) was first introduced as a model describing propagation of unidirectional gravitational waves in a shallow water approximation over a flat bottom, with u representing the fluid velocity [DGH01]. For α = 0 and for α = 1, γ = 0 we obtain the Korteweg–de Vries and the Camassa–Holm [CH93, J02] equations, respectively. Both of them describe unidire...

A number of different models with behavioral economics have a reduced form representation where potentially boundedly rational decision-makers do not necessarily internalize all the consequences of their actions on payoff relevant features (which we label as psychological states) of the choice environment. This paper studies the restrictions that such behavioral models impose on choice data and...