|
Project |
Description |
| Anarchy and Conflict |
How do people use private spontaneous groups to cooperate and cope with conflict? |
| Auction Discovery |
What characteristics underlie the spontaneous emergence of auctions in the laboratory exchange environment? |
| Auctions versus Negotiations |
Do auction mechanisms or negotiations benefit a corporate procurement division more when it purchases products from vendors with different ancillary services? |
| Bubble Formation |
What cause market bubbles and speculation? When asset life, gains from trade, and levels of dividend uncertainty are manipulated? |
| Combo Auctions |
When a seller conducts an online auction for multiple items of related value (e.g. computers and printers) at each step of the auction which item’s price does he raise and by how much? |
|
Cultural Accumulation |
When does the accumulation of knowledge and skill in language and observation result in real progress? Are there conditions under which it predictably fails? |
| Disclosure and Contracts |
How can disclosure of information in an investment setting be substituted for contracting? |
| Drug Testing |
How can we devise ways in which responsible drug testing can be done more quickly and without a federal (FDA) monopoly? |
|
Efficiency and Drift in Markets |
Can claims about the existence of observed market efficiency and drift be understood from laboratory experiments? |
| Electric Power |
Does the government need to construct special incentives to induce the private sector to build new generators? |
| Fairness and Justice |
What do we mean by a “fair” experience and what are the epistemological foundations of fairness? What’s the difference between fairness and justice? |
| Health Insurance |
Should every small business be forced to buy health insurance for all of its employees and to what extent? |
Humans, Chimpanzees, Capuchin
Monkeys
& Rhesus Macaques |
Do humans and nonhuman primates share basic economic decision making strategies that account for partner identity and potential rewards for cooperation and defection? |
|
Intrinsic Value versus Money Illusion |
Under what conditions do economic agents see through distortions of fundamental values? |
| Manipulation in Information Markets |
Can information markets be manipulated when there are participants who have sufficient cash and only want to influence forecasts and do not care about capital gains. |
| Mark to Market |
Can aspects of the current financial collapse be explained through the use of mark to market accounting? |
|
Market Volatility |
How will market price respond to positive shocks (good news) and negative shocks (bad news)? |
|
Migration and Property |
Can people successfully migrate to flee plunderers and can they establish property rights in their new communities? |
| Model of Choice |
Can the classic model of economic choice be improved by incorporating how the brain processes sensory signals? |
| Navy Personnel |
What is the most efficient way to match sailors to jobs as they develop skills and march through their career development in the Navy? |
| NeuroAccounting 1 |
Is the brain the best template for how formal institutions such as legal systems, firms and economies evolve and operate? |
| NeuroAccountiing II |
Are the information processing systems of the brain the underlying basis for accounting observed in business transactions? |
| Passive vs. Active Investing |
What proportion of investment managers need to be actively investing time and effort in identifying under and overvalued assets in order that market prices become reliable indicators for passive investors? |
| Payday Loans |
Do payday loans help people out of temporary financial pinches or burden them with an inescapable cycle of debt? |
|
Personal versus Anonymous Exchange |
What precautions underlie a society’s (business’s) movement from local personal exchange to anonymous exchange? |
| Pollution Permits |
When the government sells pollution permits to limit the amount of pollution emitted should firms be allowed to bank or borrow those permits? |
| Power of Words |
How do releasing public messages with different levels of reliability affect trading prices and volumes in the stock market? |
|
Predictably Random |
The random element in economic behavior has important consequences. Can we give a good account of the shape of that randomness too? |
| Property Rights |
Did the long, dead philosophers of 18th century Scotland get it right when they argued that property is an invention of man and the foundation of a system that creates wealth? |
| Recordkeeping and Reciprocity |
Is recordkeeping a natural evolutionary outcome of an increased need to ensure trust in exchange? |
| Rule of Law |
How did the rule of law evolve to establish peaceful coexistence and prosperity? |
| Supervision |
Does the management of a firm need to constantly supervise its employees or can it induce high levels of performance with other means? |
| The Origins of (Precious Metals as) Money |
What is the process by which people adopt a commodity as money to further exchange and specialization and to set the stage for the development of market mechanisms? |
|
Too Many Firms |
Does the most inefficient firm always exit a market when the demand for a product can only support fewer suppliers? |
|
Trust and the Economic Crisis |
Can misplaced trust cascade into a financial crisis? |
| Used Cars |
What market conditions are more or less conducive for sellers to pawn off lemons on trusting buyers? |
| Venture Capital |
Given that the matching process of Venture Capitalists (VC) with Entrepreneurs seems to be influenced by past success, is there a persistent cascade resulting in a mismatch of VC and projects? |
| Whaling Norms |
How do people develop norms to avoid wasteful conflict and to what extent are these norms dependent upon the ecological conditions of the prey? |
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