Research

Publications

Working Papers

Repeated Games

Cooperation to the Fullest Extent Possible? An Infinitely Repeated Games Experiment (2022 update: NEW treatments in this version)

I experimentally investigate a new game that modifies the prisoner's dilemma.  In this game, as opposed to the regular prisoner's dilemma, there is no tradeoff between cooperation and strategic risk (uncertainty regarding the other player's strategy) that is the leading explanation for low cooperation rates found in past experiments with small discount factors.  The main finding is that there is still not pervasive cooperation; the cooperation rate is less than 50% in both repeated game treatments.  I argue that specific complexities inherent to repeated games and slightly more strategic uncertainty than traditionally modeled inhibit the emergence of full cooperation. 

Signal Jamming in Repeated Games: An Experimental Study Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

In an infinitely repeated market entry game, an entrant does not know demand and actions are unobserved but signaled via profits. The incumbent may choose a predatory price (a signal jam) when demand is high to yield negative profits to the entrant and induce exit.   Efficiency is only possible for impatient players.  I test the theory with three experimental treatments differing by the discount factor. There is more signal jamming and less efficiency as the discount factor increases consistent with the theory, although entrants mistakenly stay out of the market even when the incumbent does not signal jam.

Matching

Rankings-Dependent Preferences: A Real Goods Matching Experiment (joint with Peter Troyan). Abstract in Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC2023) 

We investigate whether preferences for objects received via a matching mechanism are influenced by how highly agents rank them in their reported rank order list.  We hypothesize that all else equal, agents receive greater utility for the same object when they rank it higher.   The addition of rankings-dependent utility implies that it may not be a dominant strategy to submit truthful preferences to a strategyproof mechanism, and that non-strategyproof mechanisms that give more agents objects they report as higher ranked may increase market welfare. We test these hypotheses with a matching experiment in a strategyproof mechanism, the random serial dictatorship, and a non-strategyproof mechanism, the Boston mechanism.  A novel feature of our experimental design is that the objects allocated in the matching markets are real goods, which allows us to directly measure rankings-dependence by eliciting values for goods both inside and outside of the mechanism. Our experimental results confirm that the elicited differences in values do decrease for lower-ranked goods.  We find no differences between the two mechanisms for the rates of truth-telling and the final welfare.

Directed Search

Directed Search Until You Transact

In each period of a dynamic directed search market, agents who transact receive their payoffs and exit the game while agents who do not transact continue to search in the market in the next period.  In an open market with entry by new agents too, equilibrium prices move in favor of the short side of the market as the discount factor increases. In both open and closed markets, there is efficiency loss.  As agents become perfectly patient, the equilibrium outcomes converge to the benchmark frictionless and efficient Bertrand competition outcomes in the closed market but not in the open market.

Works in Progress

Testing the Coase Conjecture with a Real Good (joint with Jack Fanning)

Signal-Jamming vs. Intertemporal Incentives