Despite substantial evidence for the effectiveness of monetary incentives, some experiments have shown that high-powered incentives might lead to lower performance than lesser incentives. This study explores whether firms have means to counter these potential negative effects. Building on a standard experimental design identifying the drawbacks of large-stake rewards, it shows that when workers either self-select into the task or have prior practice, high-powered incentives lead to higher average performance than a smaller reward. This effect is driven mainly by selection and practice increasing the share of workers who respond positively to high-powered incentives. These results suggest that firms have natural instruments to deal with the potential adverse effects of high-powered incentives.

Controlled laboratory conditions using monetary incentives have been utilized in previous studies that examine individual discount rates, and researchers have found several apparently robust anomalies. We conjecture that subject behavior in these experiments may be affected by (uncontrolled) factors other than discount rates. We address some experimental design issues and report a new series of experiments designed to elicit individual discount rates. Our primary treatments include: (i) informing subjects of the annual and effective interest rates associated with alternative payment streams, and (ii) informing subjects of current market interest rates. We also test for the effect of real (vs. hypothetical) payments and for the effect of delaying both payment options (vs. offering an immediate payment option). The statistical analysis uses censored data techniques to account for the interactions between field and lab incentives. Each of the information treatments appears to reduce revealed discount rates. When both types of information are provided, annual rates in the interval of 15%—17.5% are revealed, whereas rates of 20%-25% are revealed in the control session. Each of the treatments also lowers the residual variance of subject responses.

We offer a novel test of whether non-binding goals set ahead of a task are effective motivators, taking into account that individuals in principle could easily revise these goals. In our setting, subjects either set a goal some days prior to an online task (early goal) or right at the start of the task (late goal). Two further treatments allow for (unanticipated) explicit revision of the early goal. We observe that (i) early goals are larger than late goals; (ii) subjects who set early goals work more than those who only set a late goal if they explicitly revise their goal and are reminded about their revised goal. A secondary contribution of our paper is that our design addresses a treatment migration problem present in earlier studies on goals that stems from the fact that subjects in a ‘no goals’ control condition may privately set goals.

We investigate how information about the preferences of others affects the persistence of ‘bad’ social norms. One view is that bad norms thrive even when people are informed of the preferences of others, since the bad norm is an equilibrium of a coordination game. The other view is based on pluralistic ignorance, in which uncertainty about others’ preferences is crucial. In an experiment, we find clear support for the pluralistic ignorance perspective . In addition, the strength of social interactions is important for a bad norm to persist. These findings help in understanding the causes of such bad norms, and in designing interventions to change them.

We provide the first direct test of how the credibility of an auction format affects bidding behavior and final outcomes. To do so, we conduct a series of laboratory experiments where the role of the seller is played by a human subject who receives the revenue from the auction and who (depending on the treatment) has agency to determine the outcome of the auction. Contrary to theoretical predictions, we find that the non-credible second-price auction fails to converge to the first-price auction. We provide a behavioral explanation for our results based on sellers’ aversion to rule-breaking, which is confirmed by an additional experiment.

This paper examines the effects of alternative assumptions regarding the curvature of utility upon estimated discount rates in experimental data. To do so, it introduces a novel design to elicit time preference building upon a translation of the Holt and Laury method for risk. The results demonstrate that utility elicited directly from choice over time is significantly concave, but far closer to linear than utility elicited under risk. As a result, the effect of adjusting discount rates for this curvature is modest compared to assuming linear utility, and considerably less than when utility from a risk preference task is imposed.

We present experimental evidence regarding individual and group decisions over time. Static and longitudinal methods are combined to test four conditions on time preferences: impatience, stationarity, age independence, and dynamic consistency. Decision making in groups should favor coordination via communication about voting intentions. We find that individuals are neither patient nor consistent, that groups are both patient and highly consistent, and that information exchange between participants helps groups converge to stable decisions. Finally we provide additional evidence showing that our results are driven by the specific role of groups and not by either repeated choices or individual preferences when choosing for other subjects.

To investigate whether attention responds rationally to strategic incentives, we experimentally implement a buyer-seller game in which a fully informed seller makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to a buyer who faces cognitive costs to process information about the offer's value. We isolate the impact of seller strategies on buyer attention by exogenously varying the seller's outside option, which leads sellers to price high more often. We find that buyers respond by making fewer mistakes conditional on value, which suggests that buyers exert higher attentional effort in response to the increased strategic incentives for paying attention. We show that a standard model of rational inattention based on Shannon mutual information cannot fully explain this change in buyer behavior. However, we identify another class of rational inattention models consistent with this behavioral pattern.

We study how people solve the optimal stopping problem of buying an airline ticket. Over a set of problems, people were given 12 opportunities to buy a ticket ranging from 12 months before travel to 1 day before. The distributions from which prices were sampled changed over time, following patterns observed in industry analysis of flight ticket pricing. We characterize the optimal decision process in terms of a set of thresholds that set the maximum purchase price for each time point. In a behavioral analysis, we find that the average price people pay is above the optimal, that there is little evidence people learn over the sequence of problems, but that there are likely significant individual differences in the way people make decisions. In a model-based analysis, we propose a set of nine possible decision strategies, based on how purchasing probabilities change according to time and the price of the ticket. Using Bayesian latent-mixture methods, we infer the strategies used by the participants, finding that some use purely time-based strategies, while others also attend to the price of the tickets. We conclude by noting the limitations in the strategies as accounts of people's decision making, highlighting the need to consider sequential effects and other context effects on purchasing behavior.

We report the results of an experimental investigation of a key axiom of economic theories of dynamic decision making—namely, that agents plan. Inferences from previous investigations have been confounded with issues concerning the preference functionals of the agents. Here, we present an innovative experimental design which is driven purely by dominance: if preferences satisfy dominance, we can infer whether subjects are planning or not. We implement three sets of experiments: the first two (the Individual Treatments) in which the same player takes decisions both in the present and the future; and the third (the Pairs Treatment) in which different players take decisions at different times. The two Individual treatments differed in that, in one, the subjects played sequentially, while, in the other, the subjects had to pre-commit to their future move. In all contexts, according to economic theory, the players in the present should anticipate the decision of the player in the future. We find that over half the participants in all three experimental treatments do not appear to be planning ahead; moreover, their ability to plan ahead does not improve with experience, except possibly when we force subjects to pre-commit to their future decision. These findings identify an important lacuna in economic theories, both for individual behaviour and for behaviour in games.

We conduct an experiment where participants make choices between completing a task now or waiting to complete it in the future. We vary the dates when a task can be completed and the effort required at each date. We infer participants’ preferences for when to complete a task and their expectations about how their future preferences will differ from their current ones. Our findings indicate that most participants prefer to complete tasks immediately, even if it demands more effort than waiting. Their choices generally align with the principles of time consistency, monotonicity, and time invariance. We show that quasi-hyperbolic discounting, anticipatory utility, fixed costs, decision costs, and cost-of-keeping-track are all unable to provide a reasonable account of both our findings and related experiments.

If the future is uncertain, optimal intertemporal decisions rely on anticipating one's own optimal future behavior as is typical in dynamic programming. Our aim is to detect experimentally stylized facts about intertemporal decision making in a rich stochastic environment. Compared to previous experimental studies our experimental design is more complex since the time horizon is uncertain and termination probabilities have to be updated. In particular the decision task is non-stationary as in real life which seriously complicates the task of diagnosing behavioral regularities. In this study we give some illustrative results and provide some general perspectives. Our main result is that subjects’ reaction to information about termination probablilities are qualitatively correct.

We experimentally study competitive markets with socially responsible production. Our main focus is on the producers’ decision whether or not to reveal the degree of social responsibility of their product. Compared to two benchmark cases where either full transparency is enforced or no disclosure is possible, we show that voluntary and costless disclosure comes close to the full transparency benchmark. However, when the informational content of disclosure is imperfect, social responsibility in the market is significantly lower than under full transparency. Our results highlight an important role for transparent and standardized information about social externalities.

The present study transforms subjective conflict perceptions into formally defined games, tests the reliability of the transformation, and explores the properties of several conflict scenarios. To this end we: (i) develop an illustration-based method that transforms implicit perceptions of expected outcomes and experiences into sets of structured numerical values, termed subjective game structures; (ii) develop a reliability index that compares the properties of two subjective games, allowing to test the consistency of repeatedly elicited games; (iii) empirically test game perceptions across eight conflict scenarios; and (iv) interpret the results in terms of two game taxonomies. The results reveal the capacity of the applied methods to transform vague social scenarios into reliable formal games, point to natural solutions, and show the distribution of games that characterizes each conflict scenario. The newly developed model and tools provide a potent instrument for studying a diverse array of social interactions, ranging from interpersonal relations to trade, political conflicts, and war. They represent invaluable resources for conducting polls, examining implicit attitudes, and assisting in the formulation of political, commercial, and social policies.

We conduct a laboratory experiment in Kenya in which we elicit time and risk preference parameters from 494 participants, using convex time budgets and tightly controlling for transaction costs. Using the Kenyan mobile money system M-Pesa to make real-time transfers to subjects’ phones , we vary whether same-day payments are made immediately after the experimental session or at the close of the business day. We find strong evidence of present bias, with estimates of the present bias parameter ranging from 0.902 to 0.924—but only when same-day payments are made immediately after the experiment.

We introduce, test, and compare two auction-based methods for eliciting discount rates. In these “patience auctions”, participants bid the smallest future sum they would prefer -or- the longest time they would wait for a reward, rather than receive a smaller, immediate payoff. The most patient bidder receives the delayed reward; all others receive the immediate payoff. These auctions allow us to compare discounting when participants’ attention is focused on the temporal versus monetary dimension of delayed rewards. We find that the estimated parameters in the three most commonly used discount functions (exponential, hyperbolic, and quasi-hyperbolic) differ across these two bidding methods (time-bids vs. money-bids). Specifically, our participants tend to show more impatience under time-bids. Furthermore, we find that people are more likely to exhibit exponential (as opposed to hyperbolic) discounting and exhibit less present bias under time-bids, compared to money-bids. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to directly compare time versus money preference elicitations, within the same subjects, using an incentive-compatible mechanism.

The paper considers what can be inferred about experimental subjects’ time preferences for consumption from responses to laboratory tasks involving tradeoffs between sums of money at different dates, if subjects can reschedule consumption spending relative to income in external capital markets. It distinguishes three approaches identifiable in the literature: the straightforward view; the separation view; and the censored data view. It shows that none of these is fully satisfactory and discusses the resulting implications for intertemporal decision-making experiments.

Pain is a highly salient and attention-demanding experience that motivates people to act. We investigated the effect of pain on decision making by delivering acute thermal pain to participants’ forearm while they made risky and intertemporal choices involving money. Participants (n = 107) were more risk seeking under pain than in a no-pain control condition when decisions involved gains but not when they involved equivalent losses. Pain also resulted in greater preference for immediate (smaller) over future (larger) monetary rewards. We interpret these results as a motivation to offset the aversive, pain-induced state, where monetary rewards become more appealing under pain than under no pain and when delivered sooner rather than later. Our findings add to the long-standing debate regarding the role of intuition and reflection in decision making.

Consumers typically overstate their intentions to purchase products, compared to actual rates of purchases, a pattern called “hypothetical bias”. In laboratory choice experiments, we measure participants’ visual attention using mousetracking or eye-tracking, while they make hypothetical as well as real purchase decisions. We find that participants spent more time looking both at price and product image prior to making a real “buy” decision than making a real “don’t buy” decision. We demonstrate that including such information about visual attention improves prediction of real buy decisions. This improvement is evident, although small in magnitude, using mousetracking data, but is not evident using eye-tracking data.

The famous linguistic-savings hypothesis states that languages that grammatically separate the future from the present (like English) causally induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future using present tense (like German or Chinese). Chen et al., European Economic Review 120 (2019) experimentally investigate the effect of using future-oriented language on incentivized intertemporal choices and find no support for the hypothesis. We replicate Chen et al., European Economic Review 120 (2019)’s study in the German-speaking context. In our experiment with 332 subjects, we randomly refer to future payments using present or future tense and find no causal effect of language on intertemporal choice. Given the importance of replications for confidence in scientific findings, our results provide corroborating evidence that the linguistic-savings hypothesis is not empirically tenable. Eventually, the results provide a methodological contribution to the conduct of experiments.