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.

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. 

We investigate the determinants of public support for a meat tax in California. Using consumption data, we first estimate the distributional effects of a Pigouvian meat tax in which revenues are redistributed equally to all Californian households as dividends. We then conduct a large-scale survey experiment on a representative Californian sample (N = 3,000+), featuring randomized treatments that provide personalized information on the policy’s financial impact on respondents’ own households, its progressivity, or its effectiveness. These informational treatments are combined with two framing interventions that highlight non-financial aspects of meat consumption and regulation: personal/social identity and freedom of choice. In addition to estimating the effects of these treatments on policy support and beliefs, we examine how political orientation, broader worldviews, and demographic and socioeconomic characteristics shape both baseline support for the meat tax and responsiveness to the interventions.

Living within sustainable boundaries necessitates reduced consumption and production practices. Ecolabels offer a potentially powerful tool to motivate consumers and producers to behave more sustainable and reduce their climate impacts. Yet, most ecolabel research focuses on consumer behavior in static choice environments, largely neglecting potential other mechanisms like coordination and the producer side. We study the impact of ecolabels as producer standards on sustainable decision-making and coordination within a novel common resource paradigm, in which a resource (forest) is depleted over time by withdrawing trees. We find that purely symbolic and monetarily incentivized ecolabels increase sustainable behavior and cooperation, leading to common forests surviving longer, and environmentally as well as economically more efficient outcomes. We show that ecolabels act as a coordination device to facilitate changing standards or norms. We conclude that ecolabels can be a powerful tool to shift standards towards sustainability.