We evaluate data on choices made from Convex Time Budgets (CTB) in Andreoni and Sprenger (2012a) and Augenblick et al. (2015), two influential studies that proposed and applied this experimental technique. We use the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference (WARP) to test for external consistency relative to pairwise choice, and demand, wealth and impatience monotonicity to test for internal consistency. We find that choices made by subjects in the original Andreoni and Sprenger (2012a) paper violate WARP frequently; violations of all three internal measures of monotonicity are concentrated in subjects who take advantage of the novel feature of CTB by making interior choices. Wealth monotonicity violations are more prevalent and pronounced than either demand or impatience monotonicity violations. We substantiate the importance of our desiderata of choice consistency in examining effort allocation choices made in Augenblick et al. (2015), where we find considerably more demand monotonicity violations, as well as many classical monotonicity violations which are associated with time-inconsistent behavior. We believe that the frequency and magnitude of WARP and monotonicity violations found in the two studies pose important confounds for interpreting and structurally estimating choice patterns elicited through CTB. We encourage researchers employing CTB in present and future experiments to include consistency tests in their design and pre-estimation analysis.

The paper establishes a tight relation between non-standard behaviors in the domains of risk and time, by considering a decision maker with non-expected utility preferences who believes that only present consumption is certain while any future consumption is uncertain. We provide the first complete characterizations of the two-way relations between the certainty effect and present biased temporal behavior, and between the common ratio effect and temporal reversals related to the common difference effect.

Selfish preferences cannot explain the significant instances of cooperation observed in Finitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma experiments. This paper deploys a novel experiment to compare four theories that explain cooperation. The four theories capture the following four non-pecuniary motives: caring about others (Altruism), being conscientious about cooperation (Duty), enjoying the pleasure of collaborative cooperation (Reciprocal Cooperation), and concerns for reciprocal kindness (Sequential Reciprocity). Our experimental design varies the decline-rate of future rewards, under which these theories make contrasting predictions. We find that our data is best explained by Reciprocal Cooperation-type subjects.

Many recent experiments studying political protests elicit subjects’ beliefs and actions, before and after an information intervention, to assess the causal role of beliefs on actions. We show that unless beliefs are symmetric and unimodal, using a belief elicitation scheme that is mismatched with the research question may affect the magnitude and even reverse the sign of identified effects. We provide a simple characterization of when such a sign reversal occurs. As an example, we revisit Cantoni et al. (2019)’s influential study of whether political protests are strategic complements or substitutes. We show how their belief elicitation method allows, in theory, a novel and alternative interpretation of their results, which could have been avoided with a different method.

We study peer-grading with competitive graders who enjoy a higher utility when their peers get lower scores. We propose a new mechanism, PEQA, that incentivizes such graders through a score-assignment rule which aggregates the final score from multiple peer-evaluations, and a grading performance score which rewards performance in the peer-grading exercise. PEQA makes grader-bias irrelevant. Additionally, under PEQA, a peer-grader's utility increases monotonically with the reliability of her grading, irrespective of her competitiveness and how her co-graders act. In a reasonably general class of score assignment rules, PEQA uniquely satisfies this utility-reliability monotonicity. When grading is costly and costs are private information, a modified version of PEQA implements the socially optimal effort-choices in an equilibrium of the peer-evaluation game. Data from our classroom experiments confirm our theoretical assumptions and show that PEQA outperforms the popular median mechanism.

Do experimental subjects have consistent first and higher-order beliefs about other's preferences? How does any inconsistency affect strategic decisions? We introduce a simple four-player sequential social dilemma where actions reveal first and higher-order beliefs. The unique sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) is observed less than 5% of the time, even though our diagnostic treatments show that a majority of our subjects are self-interested, higher-order rational and have accurate first-order beliefs. In our data, strategic play vastly deviates from Nash predictions because first-order and higher-order beliefs are inconsistent for most subjects.

We study the value of and the demand for instrumentally-valuable information in an environment where signals are transparently biased. We observe remarkable sophistication in information aggregation and acquisition. A majority of our subjects (63%) made unbiased reports even when faced with biased signals. When allowed to buy pairs of opposite or similarly biased information sources, subjects actively shopped for diverse information at personal costs, and their demand for diverse information reacted rationally to its value and cost. Subjects who were worse at aggregating information, were more likely to purchase diverse signals. Our results advocate for greater transparency in media bias.

Can team incentives increase worker's productivity and decrease procrastination in intertemporal tasks? We recruited just under 600 online workers to engage in tedious tasks over three days. They were randomly assigned to either individualistic (Solo) incentives or to one of two team-based incentives (Cooperative and Competitive). Contrary to theoretical predictions, workers under Cooperative incentives surpassed the performance of those working under either Solo or Competitive incentives. Productivity on Day 1, which in theory should inversely relate to procrastination, was also significantly higher in both team treatments. Our structural analysis confirms that teams increase productivity by enhancing intrinsic motivation and by reducing the tendency to delay work. Finally, teams increase productivity further under Competitive incentives, when workers can observe and react to the efforts of their team members.

Rational agents must perform backwards induction by thinking contingently about future states and actions, but failures of backwards induction and contingent reasoning are ubiquitous. How do boundedly-rational agents make decisions when they fail to correctly forecast actions in the future? We construct an individual decision-making experiment to collect a rich dataset in which subjects must reason only about their own future actions. We demonstrate substantial mistakes relative to the rational benchmark, and use the rich dataset to estimate several possible models of boundedly-rational foresight. We find that a model in which subjects expect to make more mistakes when the payoff consequences of their future actions are more similar best explains behavior.

We introduce and study, both theoretically and empirically, the notion of `future self-proof' mechanisms, those in which boundedly rational individuals do not need to rationally forecast their own future actions (or those of others). We construct an obviously strategy-proof (OSP) elicitation mechanism, showing that it greatly outperforms the standard Becker-Degroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism, but also sometimes fails due to the fact that it is not future self-proof. Motivated by recent experimental findings, we then define a new notion of future self-proof mechanisms, which we call game-structure obvious (GSO). We find empirically that a GSO mechanism outperforms the OSP mechanism.

We use a real-effort experiment to jointly estimate present bias and sophistication parameters, separately over money and effort. Our novel incentive structure aligns the choice scenario with the canonical assumption of choices being the interior optima of a concave utility-maximization exercise. Participants choose to (and predict to) complete 14% (and 10%) fewer tasks on the same day than on a future day, leading to an estimated βe between 0.70 and .79 (and ̂βe between 0.80 and .88). We find no evidence of present bias or sophistication over money.

In prosocial decisions, decision-makers are inherently uncertain about how their decisions impact others’ utility – we call this interpersonal uncertainty. We show that people's response to interpersonal uncertainty shapes well-known patterns of prosocial behavior. First, using standard social allocation decisions, we replicate the classic patterns of ingroup favoritism, merit-based fairness ideals, and self-favoring behavior in dictator games. We then show that these patterns also arise in non-social decisions which have no consequences for others and instead solely reflect responses to interpersonal uncertainty. Behavior across social and non-social decisions is highly correlated, and self-reported interpersonal uncertainty predicts behavior in both situations. Moreover, exogenously varying interpersonal uncertainty shifts prosocial behavior in the direction that avoids such uncertainty. Our results quantify how beliefs in the form of interpersonal uncertainty influence prosocial behavior, which we estimate to be of similar importance to social preferences.

We hypothesize that broad contact, involving brief interactions with multiple outgroup members, and deep contact, meaning longer interactions with a single outgroup member, play distinct roles in shaping intergroup relations. We set up a factory in India and recruited Hindu and Muslim men to work in pairs on joint production tasks. We randomly assigned participants to work either with the same ingroup or outgroup partner daily (deep contact), a different outgroup partner each day (broad contact), or to a control group. While deep contact strengthens social and economic ties with the outgroup partner interacted with, only broad contact reduces misperceptions about outgroup strangers. These findings align with a model in which independent sampling (observing multiple outgroup members) promotes learning about outgroups more than prolonged interaction with a single individual does. Nevertheless, neither type of contact changes behavior toward the wider outgroup.

Measuring democracy remains a core challenge in the social sciences. Leading indicators rely on the assessments of a small groups of experts. This paper identifies two key statistical limitations underlying these measurements. First, expert judgments are likely to be highly correlated, thus reducing the value of aggregation. Second, expert pools are often small and thus noisy. We model democracy as a latent, unobservable state and propose a new approach rooted in the logic of the ``wisdom of crowds" to address these issues. We show that including  a broader and more diverse set of observers—including non-experts—can improve inference. Our theoretical results quantify when such larger, decorrelated samples can outweigh the costs of noisier individual judgments, and thus provide more accurate estimates of the true state. We then develop an algorithm for implementation and apply it to data on democratic performance in the U.S., demonstrating significant empirical gains.