In dynamic strategic interactions, a player who spies the opponent's actions might have incentives to feign ignorance and forgo immediate payoffs so that he can earn higher future payoffs by manipulating the opponent's suspicion. I model and experimentally implement the situation as a two-stage hide-and-seek game. A substantial share of the spying players fails to feign ignorance, despite the empirical suboptimality of the behavior and their largely correct predictions about opponents' suspicion. Subjects are highly heterogeneous in their tendency to feign ignorance and show only moderate learning. The players who are spied on hold empirically correct beliefs and mostly best-respond.

In legislative bargaining, the proposer is often able to extract a greater proportion of the surplus. However, a higher likelihood of being selected as the proposer can backfire, as it may reduce the probability that the agent is included in a winning coalition. We experimentally test the theoretical prediction of potentially negative returns to recognition probability in two-period legislative bargaining noted in Baron & Ferejohn (1989). We find that higher recognition probability benefits subjects in all treatments, except one in which we automate the second period. It is because proposers often favor the member with the greater recognition probability as a coalition partner, and such tendency varies depending on the proposer’s recognition probability, counter to the theoretical prediction. In all treatments, a vast majority of subjects exhibit a strict preference for higher recognition probability.

Observing others' actions can provide both advantages and disadvantages to the observer. At workplaces, high visibility of employee behavior may reduce strategic risk for managers but also trigger adverse strategic responses from employees, such as reluctance to experiment or innovate. This study theoretically analyzes and experimentally tests the optimality of monitoring decisions in games where one player (e.g., a manager) selects a probability of monitoring the other player's (e.g., an employee's) actions. While the employee knows the probability of monitoring, he does not know whether his actions are observed. The model predicts incentive conditions for Transparency Paradox (Bernstein, 2012) where high-probability monitoring is suboptimal for managers and overall efficiency. Most experimental subjects refrain from monitoring with certainty, but they substantially and persistently over-monitor when the payoffs incentivize more cautious monitoring. Specifically, the monitoring players' tendency to overexploit the monitored players' efficiency-enhancing action (e.g. innovation) disincentivizes such action irrespective of monitoring probability, which in turn rationalizes over-monitoring. These observations align with the qualitative predictions of Quantal Response Equilibrium. A reinforcement learning model predicts the persistence of over-monitoring. The findings highlight the incentive conditions and dynamics that make organizations susceptible to invasive monitoring, resulting in inefficient and unequal economic outcomes.

Mitigating climate change requires urgent shifts toward sustainable consumption and production. While ecolabels have been widely studied as cost-effective tools for influencing consumer behavior, their effects on producers remain largely unexplored. We test the effect of ecolabels on sustainable production behavior in a dynamic common-pool resource dilemma with real economic and environmental incentives. In our lab experiment, groups of participants trade off short-term individual profits from resource extraction against long-term group-level gains and resource preservation. We find that ecolabels significantly increase sustainable production and extend resource longevity, improving both long-term environmental and economic outcomes. They facilitate early coordination on sustainable behavior which is then maintained through conditional cooperation. Importantly, these effects arise even when ecolabels are purely symbolic and provide no monetary benefit. Our findings uncover underexplored producer-side mechanisms of ecolabels and suggest that, beyond consumer nudges, ecolabels can serve as powerful policy instruments for promoting sustainable production.

In economic and social relationships, such as employment and marriages, participants often have the option to separate from their partner. This study experimentally investigates how the option to separate with or without a cost affects cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma game. For costly separation, I consider the cost of establishing a new match as well as the opportunity cost of missed interactions due to delays in matching. The theoretical model assumes the coexistence of non-strategic defectors and strategic conditional cooperators and predicts the long-run cooperation rate to which the population converges as players learn the initially unknown type distribution through experience. The experimental data support the theoretical prediction that compared to no separation, costless separation lowers the cooperation rate in the long run. The low cooperation rate and positive assortment through separation from defectors result in greater equity within matches. Costly separation increases the cooperation rate compared to no separation, yet the higher cooperation rate improves efficiency only under the high continuation probability. 

Previous experiments on delegated decision making find seemingly contradictory results: some experiments find that people take greater risks when they decide for others than for themselves, while other experiments find the opposite. I hypothesize that these mixed conclusions are the result of the type and the timing of feedback provided to subjects and conduct an experiment to identify these causes. In a choice between two binary lotteries, subjects either learn the outcome of only the chosen lottery or the outcome for both the chosen and the unchosen lottery. Feedback is provided immediately after each decision or after a sequence of ten decisions. I find that when subjects receive an immediate feedback on the outcome of both the chosen and the unchosen options, they make a risky shift. That is, subjects take greater risks for others than for themselves. If I alter either the timing or the content of feedback, the risky shift disappears. If I alter both the timing and the content of feedback so that the feedback is given at the end, only on the outcome of the chosen option, I find a risky shift again. These findings reconcile the contradictory results in the previous studies. I present a theoretical model and analyze how subjects' risk-taking behavior evolves as they make more decisions.

We investigate belief bias in the Inverse-Order Statistic Problem, where individuals infer underlying states from rank-selected signals, such as “first-best” disclosures in economic contexts and social media. A lab experiment elicited participants’ beliefs about the share of black balls in jars based on the highest or median signal observed across multiple samples. Our pilot experiment finds a persistent positive bias in beliefs—overestimating the number of black balls—when participants are shown the highest signal. Although errors decrease over time, positive bias persists, and even increases in the Description treatment where the underlying distribution was explicitly described. This trend is driven by female participants whose asymmetric learning reduces only negative errors. The positive bias predicts suboptimal economic decisions, such as overbidding in auctions. 

Meat consumption generates significant environmental, health, and animal welfare externalities, yet meat taxes remain highly unpopular. We investigate the reasons for this opposition. We use a survey-experiment with over 3,000 Californians on a progressive tax-and-dividend policy, where revenues are redistributed to consumers. Respondents watched a video explaining the policy before reporting their support or opposition and the reasons behind it. Our randomly assigned treatments address both economic factors (self-interest, regressivity, effectiveness) and non-economic ones (freedom of choice, identity). Opposition is widespread (60%). It is primarily motivated by concerns over freedom, self-interest, and regressivity, and strongly associates with trust in government, political orientation, and an omnivore diet. Progressivity information substantially shifts beliefs and increases support by 4 p.p. Beliefs about self-interest are highly pessimistic and strongly predictive of opposition, yet personalized tax incidence information has little effect on beliefs and none on support. Framing the policy as freedom-preserving marginally raises support but polarizes opinions. Priming subjects with meat-related culture and identity reduces support by 5 p.p. and shifts unrelated beliefs, consistent with motivated reasoning.