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In a series of laboratory experiments, we explore the impact of different market features (the level of information, search costs, and the level of commitment) on agents' behavior and on the outcome of decentralized matching markets. In our experiments, subjects on each side of the market actively search for a partner, make proposals, and are free to accept or reject any proposal received at any time throughout the game. Our results suggest that a low information level does not affect the stability or the efficiency of the final outcome, although it boosts market activity, unless coupled with search costs. Search costs have a significant negative impact on stability and on market activity. Finally, commitment harms stability slightly but acts as a disciplinary device to market activity and is associated with higher efficiency levels of the final outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new matching mechanism that is a hybrid of the two most common mechanisms in school choice, the Boston Mechanism (BM) and the Deferred Acceptance algorithm (DA). BM is the most commonly used mechanism in the field, but it is neither strategyproof nor fair. DA is the mechanism that is typically favored by economists, but it is not Pareto efficient. The new mechanism, the Secure Boston Mechanism (sBM), is an intuitive modification of BM that secures any school a student was initially guaranteed but otherwise prioritizes a student at a school based upon how she ranks it. Relative to BM, theoretical results suggest that sBM is an improvement in terms of strategyproofness and fairness. We present experimental evidence using a novel experimental design that confirms that sBM significantly increases truth-telling and fairness. Relative to DA, theoretical results suggest that sBM can be a Pareto improvement in equilibrium but the efficiency comparison of sBM and DA is theoretically ambiguous. We present simulation evidence that suggests that sBM often does Pareto dominate DA when DA is inefficient, while sBM and DA very often overlap when DA is efficient. Overall, our results strongly support the use of sBM over BM and suggest that sBM should be considered as a viable alternative to DA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an experiment using Stag Hunt games with different payoff ranges. Specifically, in one treatment for half of the games the payoff dominant and the risk dominant equilibrium coincide and for the other half of the games they conflict; in the second treatment they always conflict. The experiment provides evidence that the payoff range experienced by the participant influences the likelihood of efficient conventions emerging. In particular, experiencing games where payoff dominance and risk dominance coincide appears to make payoff dominance more attractive in games in which they conflict. In the experiment, we also observe conditional behavior emerging with experience. We develop a model of conditional expectations to explain these stylized facts that depends crucially on the assumption that after a brief learning period participants categorize their experience using the same relative bandwidth in both treatments even though the range of experience is twice as large in treatment 1 as it is in treatment 2. The assumption cannot be rejected by the data. The analysis provides a formal example in which increasing experienced diversity by changing the way similar experiences are categorized increases the likelihood of efficient conventions emerging in communities playing similar Stag Hunt games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We extend the study of procedural fairness in three new directions. Firstly, we focus on lotteries determining the initial roles in a two-person game. One of the roles carries a potential advantage over the other. All the experimental literature has thus far focused on lotteries determining the final payoffs of a game. Secondly, we modify procedural fairness in a dynamic-i.e. over several repetitions of a game-as well as in a static-i.e. within a single game-sense. Thirdly, we analyse whether assigning individuals a minimal chance of achieving an advantaged position is enough to make them willing to accept substantially more inequality. We find that procedural fairness matters under all of these accounts. Individuals clearly respond to the degree of fairness in assigning initial roles, appraise contexts that are dynamically fair more positively than contexts that are not, and are generally more willing to accept unequal outcomes when they are granted a minimal opportunity to acquire the advantaged position. Unexpectedly, granting full equality of opportunity does not lead to the highest efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the relative merits of the Boston and Serial Dictatorship mechanisms when the timing of students' preference submission over schools varies within the structure of the mechanism. Despite the well-documented disadvantages of the Boston mechanism Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez (American Economic Review 93:729-747 ), we hypothesize that a Boston mechanism where students are required to submit their preferences before the realization of their exam scores, can in fact have fairness and efficiency advantages compared to the often favored Serial Dictatorship mechanism. We test these hypotheses in a series of laboratory experiments which vary by the class of mechanism implemented, and the preference submission timing by students, reflective of actual policy changes which have occurred in China. Our experimental findings confirm the efficiency hypothesis straightforwardly, and lend support to the fairness hypothesis when subjects have the chance to learn with experience. The results have important policy implications for school choice mechanism design when students' relative rankings by schools are initially uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a human-subjects experiment to investigate how bargaining outcomes are affected by changes in bargainers’ disagreement payoffs. Subjects bargain against changing opponents, with randomly drawn asymmetric disagreement outcomes that vary over plays of the game, and with complete information about disagreement payoffs and the cake size. We find that subjects only respond about half as much as theoretically predicted to changes in their own disagreement payoff and to changes in their opponent’s disagreement payoff. This effect is observed in a standard Nash demand game and a related unstructured bargaining game, in both early and late rounds, and is robust to moderate changes in stake sizes. We show theoretically that standard models of expected utility maximisation are unable to account for this under-responsiveness, even when generalised to allow for risk aversion. We also show that quantal-response equilibrium has, at best, mixed success in characterising our results. However, a simple model of other-regarding preferences can explain our main results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally investigate in the laboratory prominent mechanisms that are employed in school choice programs to assign students to public schools and study how individual behavior is influenced by preference intensities and risk aversion. Our main results show that (a) the Gale-Shapley mechanism is more robust to changes in cardinal preferences than the Boston mechanism independently of whether individuals can submit a complete or only a restricted ranking of the schools and (b) subjects with a higher degree of risk aversion are more likely to play 'safer' strategies under the Gale-Shapley but not under the Boston mechanism. Both results have important implications for enrollment planning and the possible protection risk averse agents seek. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the implications of different pricing rules in discrete clock auctions. The two most common pricing rules are highest-rejected bid (HRB) and lowest-accepted bid (LAB). Under HRB, the winners pay the lowest price that clears the market; under LAB, the winners pay the highest price that clears the market. In theory, both the HRB and LAB auctions maximize revenues and are fully efficient in our setting. Our experimental results indicate that the LAB auction achieves higher revenues. This revenue result may explain the frequent use of LAB pricing. On the other hand, HRB is successful in eliciting true values of the bidders both theoretically and experimentally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data aggregated from seven papers that study repeated play in standard ultimatum games with either stranger or absolute stranger matching, we show that the behavior of responders changes with experience. High offers are more likely to be accepted with experience and low offers are more likely to be rejected. At the individual level, there is a negative relationship between the likelihood that a given offer is accepted and the size of the preceding offer. We compare the results with predictions generated by static models of distributional preferences, implicitly dynamic models of preferences with reciprocity, and explicitly dynamic models of adaptive learning. The data is most consistent with models of preferences with reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extant microeconomic literature on matching markets assumes ordinal preferences for matches, while bargaining within matches is mostly excluded. Central for this paper, however, is bargaining over joint profits from potential matches. We investigate, both theoretically and experimentally, a seemingly simple allocation task in a 2×2 market with repeated negotiations. When inefficiency is possible, about 1/3 of the complete matches are inefficient and, overall, more than 3/4 of the experimental allocations are unstable. These results strongly contradict existing bargaining theories requiring efficient matches. Even with regard to efficient matches, the tested theories perform poorly. Standard bargaining and behavioral concepts, such as Selten's () Equal Division Core, are outperformed by the simplistic ε-Equal Split, i.e., an equal split of the joint profit plus/minus ε. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Game theory predicts that players make strategic commitments that may appear counter-intuitive. We conducted an experiment to see if people make a counter-intuitive but strategically optimal decision to avoid information. The experiment is based on a sequential Nash demand game in which a responding player can commit ahead of the game not to see what a proposing player demanded. Our data show that subjects do, but only after substantial time, learn to make the optimal strategic commitment. We find only weak evidence of physical timing effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Veto power consists of the right of one or more players to unilaterally block decisions but without the ability to unilaterally secure their preferred outcome. Our experiment shows that (i) committees with a veto player take longer to reach decisions (are less efficient) and generate less consensus than without a veto player, (ii) veto power substantially enhances proposer’s power, and (iii) non-veto players are substantially more willing to compromise than veto players. We relate our results to the theoretical literature on the impact of veto power as well as to concerns about the impact of veto power in real-life committees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two recent models incorporating fairness considerations into the economics literature based on agents' concerns about the distribution of payoffs between themselves and others (Fehr-Schmidt, 1999, Quarterly Journal of Economics. 114 (3), 769–816; Bolton-Ockenfels, 2000, American Economic Review. 90, 166–193) are investigated using a new three-person ultimatum game: One person allocates a sum of money to two others, one of which is randomly chosen to accept or reject the offer. Rejection gives both the responder and the proposer zero income and a positive consolation prize for the non-responder. The data show essentially no reductions in rejection rates, holding offers constant, with and without consolation prizes, contrary to both models' predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate, in an experimental setting, the effect of private information on the Coase theorem's predictions of efficiency and allocative neutrality. For a two-person bargaining game, we find significantly more inefficiency and allocative bias in the case of private information compared with the case of complete information. We also find substantial bargaining breakdown, which is not predicted by the Coase theorem. For the case of private information, we reject the Coase theorem in favor of the alternative of a generalized version of the Myerson—Satterthwaite theorem, which predicts inefficiency, allocative bias in the direction of the disagreement point, and some bargaining breakdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report the results of additional exchange ultimatum game experiments conducted at the same time as the exchange ultimatum game experiments reported in Hoffman et al. (Games and Economic Behavior, 7(3), pp. 346–380, 1994). In these additional experiments, we use instructions to change an impersonal exchange situation to a personal exchange situation. To do this, we prompt sellers to consider what choices their buyers will make. Game theory would predict that thinking about the situation would lead sellers to make smaller offers to buyers. In contrast, we find a significant increase in seller offers to buyers. This result suggests that encouraging sellers to thinking about buyer choices focuses their attention on the strategic interaction with humans who think they way they do in personal exchange situations, and who may punish them for unacceptable behavior, and not on the logic of the game theoretic structure of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bargaining and dilemma games have developed in experimental economics as fairly separate literatures. More than a few analysts are now persuaded that the patterns of behavior in these games are closely related, and considerable effort is being put into a search for models that bridge the gap between the two types of games. I focus on a handful of models that, when taken together, outline the conceptual issues, and provide a sense of the progress that has already been made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports two experiments that compared the standard ultimatum game played by individuals with the same game played by three-person groups. In the group treatment, the members of the allocating group conducted a brief, face-to-face discussion in order to decide, as a group, on a proposed division, whereas the members of recipient group held a discussion on whether to accept or reject the proposal. If the proposal was accepted, each group member received an equal share of his group's payoff (the pie in the group condition was three times that in the individual condition). In both experiments, groups offered less than individuals. But as indicated by the low rejection rate in both treatments, groups were also willing to accept less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]