The random lottery incentive system is widely used in experimental economics to motivate subjects. This paper investigates its validity. It reports three experiments which compare responses given to decision tasks which are embedded in random lottery designs with responses in ‘single choice’ designs in which each subject faces just one task for real. The experiments were designed to detect cross-task contamination effects in the random lottery treatment. No significant differences between treatments, and no significant contamination effects, were found. Over the three experiments, observed differences between the treatments are adequately explained as sampling variation.

This paper presents and tests a simple model of competitive and unilateral market power regimes that yields countercyclical markups. Following a decrease in demand in the short run, capacity-constrained firms may have a strong incentive not to lower their prices to the new competitive price. Demand shocks may introduce market power into a previously competitive market. Experimental posted offer markets support this conjecture with complete information on the market structure. With only private information, there appears to be a hysteresis effect concerning supracompetitive prices, i.e., markets with a history of supracompetitive pricing continue to generate supracompetitive prices following demand shocks. However, competitive markets also remain competitive following demand shocks when firms only have private information on costs and capacities.

We use numerical methods to compute Nash equilibrium (NE) bid functions for four agents bidding in a first-price auction. Each bidder i is randomly assigned: ri [0, rmax], where 1 — ri is the Arrow-Pratt measure of constant relative risk aversion. Each ri is independently drawn from the cumulative distribution function Φ(·), a beta distribution on [0, rmax]. For various values of the maximum propensity to seek risk, rmax, the expected value of any bidder's risk characteristic, E(ri), and the probability that any bidder is risk seeking, P (ri > 1), we determine the nonlinear characteristics of the (NE) bid functions.

The Bonn Workshop 1997—Theories of Bounded Rationality, (May 6-10, 1997) was an international meeting of researchers interested in behavioral theories in economics. It was held in honor of Reinhard Selten. One goal of the workshop was to provide a platform for the introduction of new theories improving the understanding for the boundedly rational behavior of economic agents. Another goal was to support the search for links between existing theories of bounded rationality. We restricted the focus to the following topics:

1. (1) Individual Decision Making;

2. (2) Learning and Coordination;

3. (3) Bargaining and Reciprocity;

4. (4) Markets and Economic Institutions.

In order to generate a common basis for discussion, we invited four researchers to give state- of-the-art presentations on each of the four topics. The presentations were general overviews of the corresponding experimental, empirical, and theoretical literature. Each presentation also confronted conflicting approaches and provided an insight into the problems of theory formation. The state of the art contributions were the fulcrum of vigorous discussions and had a major impact on the proceeding of the workshop. We are convinced that these contributions will be of great interest to the broader audience that they can reach through publication.

The main objectives of this paper are: (i) To give a pithy, opinionated summary of what has been learned about bounded rationality in individual decision making from experiments in economics and psychology (drawing on my 1995 Handbook of Experimental Economics chapter); and (ii) mention some promising new directions for research which would be included if that chapter were written today.