We conduct a repeated VCM (voluntary contribution mechanism) experiment using the strategy method. We compare a partner and a stranger design and find that participants in the partner treatment provide (i) higher initial contributions, (ii) higher contributions on average over all periods, and (iii) contributions that do not vary more strongly with past contributions than participants in the st...

This paper develops a theoretical framework of consumer learning and product valuation when attending to new information is costly. The key attribute of the model is that agents are unsure what product characteristics are present in a good. In the model increased beliefs that a good contains valuable attributes serves to increase learning and, possibly, willingness to pay for the good. We devel...

Observing that people often use categorization to simplify choice problems and follow some search order to make a choice, we develop and axiomatize a stochastic choice model in which the decision maker first categorizes alternatives in a menu into disjoint categories, then search over categories sequentially until making a choice. The model subsumes both the Luce model and the random considerat...

Definitive judgment about the quality of decision making is made difficult by twin problems of measurement and identification. A measure of decision-making quality is hard to formalize, to quantify, and to make practical for use in a variety of choice environments; and it is difficult to distinguish differences in decision-making quality from unobserved differences in preferences, information, ...

Interpreting Time Horizon Effects in Inter-Temporal Choice We compare different designs that have been used to test for an impact of time horizon on discounting, using real incentives and two representative data sets. With the most commonly used type of design we replicate the typical finding of declining (hyperbolic) discounting, but with other designs find constant or increasing discounting. ...

We investigate the role of respect and monetary gifts in the service industry. We report findings from purchases of more than 800 doner durum, a common lunch snack. Prior to the food’s preparation, we either give a compliment about the product, or a monetary gift by tipping. We repeat the interaction on five consecutive days. Our findings show that salespersons exhibit positive reciprocity in r...

The value of information is examined in a single-agent environment with unawareness. Although the agent has a correct prior about events he is aware of and has a clear understanding of his available actions and payoffs, his unawareness may lead him to commit information processing errors and to behave suboptimally. As a result, the value of information can be negative, contrasting what is true ...

Recent studies find ample evidence that monetary and immaterial gifts influence effort in the workplace. We investigate the impacts of monetary gift exchange and of expressions of respect on salespersons’ reciprocity when purchasing doner durum, a common lunch snack. Prior to the food’s preparation, we either induce monetary gift exchange by tipping or explore the role of respect by making a co...

Knowledge management is a rapidly growing application field firmly anchored in to principal domains, the Human Resource Management domain and the IT domain. As usual in new and rapidly expanding technological areas a dispute arises pertaining to the functional scope and modelling paradigms of the Knowledge Management System architectures. We present our views pertaining to the KMS architecture ...

Using the techniques of revealed preference analysis, we study a two-stage model of choice behavior. In the first stage, the decision maker maximizes a menu-dependent binary relation encoding preferences that are imperfectly perceived. In the second, a menu-independent binary relation is maximized over the subset of alternatives that survive the first stage. This structure can support various i...