Leeat Yariv

Princeton University | PU · Department of Economics

The experimental literature on repeated games has largely focused on settings where players discount the future identically. In applications, however, interactions often occur between players whose time preferences differ. We study experimentally the effects of discounting differentials in infinitely repeated coordination games. In our data, differ...

We study dynamic task allocation when providers' expertise evolves endogenously through training. We characterize optimal assignment protocols and compare them to discretionary procedures, where it is the clients who select their service providers. Our results indicate that welfare gains from centralization are greater when tasks arrive more rapidl...

Over the past several decades, lab experiments have offered economists a rich source of evidence on incentivized behavior. In this article, we use detailed data on experimental papers to describe recent trends in the literature. We also discuss various experimentation platforms and new approaches to the design and analysis of the data they generate...

Most doctors in the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) match with one of their most preferred internship programs. However, surveys indicate doctors’ preferences are similar, suggesting a puzzle: how can so many doctors match with their top choices when positions are scarce? We provide one possible explanation. We show that the patterns in t...

We study the impacts of incomplete information on centralized one-to-one matching markets. We focus on the commonly used Deferred Acceptance mechanism (Gale and Shapley 1962). We show that many complete-information results are fragile to a small infusion of uncertainty about others’ preferences. (JEL C78, D11, D21, D47)

Goods and services -- public housing, medical appointments, schools -- are often allocated to individuals who rank them similarly but differ in their preference intensities. We characterize optimal allocation rules when individual preferences are known and when they are not. Several insights emerge. First-best allocations may involve assigning some...

We study the impacts of incomplete information on centralized one-to-one matching markets. We focus on the commonly used Deferred Acceptance mechanism (Gale and Shapley, 1962). We show that many complete-information results are fragile to a small infusion of uncertainty about others' preferences.

We study a model of collective search by teams. Discoveries beget discoveries and correlated search results are governed by a Brownian path. Search results' variation at any point -- the search scope -- is jointly controlled. Agents individually choose when to cease search and implement their best discovery. We characterize equilibrium and optimal...

We study the effectiveness of iterated elimination of strictly-dominated actions in random games. We show that dominance solvability of games is vanishingly small as the number of at least one player's actions grows. Furthermore, conditional on dominance solvability, the number of iterations required to converge to Nash equilibrium grows rapidly as...

The search for good outcomes–be it government policies, technological breakthroughs, or lasting purchases–takes time and effort. At times, the decision process is unconstrained: an individual seeking a well-priced product determines her search scope and time as she wishes. At times, search is constrained, either through institutions or cognitive li...

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire undergraduate university student population, a representative sample of the US population, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about the external validity of experiments with student participants. Behavior in the student population offers bo...

May's theorem (1952), a celebrated result in social choice, provides the foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice procedures that grant voters identical roles. We show that a weakening of May's symmetry assumption allows for a far richer set o...

We study a dynamic matching environment where individuals arrive sequentially. There is a trade‐off between waiting for a thicker market, allowing for higher‐quality matches, and minimizing agents' waiting costs. The optimal mechanism cumulates a stock of incongruent pairs up to a threshold and matches all others in an assortative fashion instantan...

Most doctors in the NRMP are matched to one of their most-preferred internship programs. Since various surveys indicate similarities across doctors' preferences, this suggests a puzzle. How can nearly everyone get a position in a highly-desirable program when positions in each program are scarce? We provide one possible explanation for this puzzle....

Most doctors in the NRMP are matched to one of their most-preferred internship programs. Since various surveys indicate similarities across doctors' preferences, this suggests a puzzle. How can nearly everyone get a position in a highly-desirable program when positions in each program are scarce? We provide one possible explanation for this puzzle....

A celebrated result in social choice is May's Theorem (1952), providing the foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice procedures that grant voters identical roles. We show that a modification of May's symmetry assumption allows for a far richer...

Measurement error is ubiquitous in experimental work. It leads to imperfect statistical controls, attenuated estimated effects of elicited behaviors, and biased correlations between characteristics. We develop statistical techniques for handling experimental measurement error. These techniques are applied to data from the Caltech Cohort Study, whic...

A celebrated result in social choice is May's Theorem, providing the foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice procedures that grant voters identical roles. We show that a modification of May's symmetry assumption allows for a far richer set of...

We present a dynamic model of sequential information acquisition by a heterogeneous committee. At each date, agents decide whether to vote to adopt one of two alternatives or continue to collect more information. The process stops when a qualified majority vote for an alternative. Three main insights emerge from our analysis and are consistent with...

We present results from laboratory experiments studying the impacts of affirmative-action policies. We induce statistical discrimination in simple labor-market interactions between rms and workers. We then introduce affirmative-action policies that vary in the size and duration of a subsidy firms receive for hiring discriminated-against workers. Th...

May's theorem (1952), a celebrated result in social choice, provides the foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice procedures that grant voters identical roles. We show that a weakening of May's symmetry assumption allows for a far richer set o...

We use laboratory experiments to test for one of the foundations of the rational voter paradigm—that voters respond to probabilities of being pivotal. We exploit a setup that entails stark theoretical effects of information concerning the preference distribution (as revealed through polls) on costly participation decisions. We find that voting prop...

Behavioral economics presents a "paternalistic" rationale for a benevolent government's intervention. We consider an economy where the only "distortion" is agents' time-inconsistency. We study the desirability of various forms of collective action, ones pertaining to costly commitment and ones pertaining to the timing of consumption, when governmen...

We experimentally study the Gale and Shapley, 1962 mechanism, which is utilized in a wide set of applications, most prominently the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). Several insights come out of our analysis. First, only 48% of our observed outcomes are stable, and among those a large majority culminate at the receiver-optimal stable match...

This paper studies the formation of peer groups entailing the joint production of public goods. In our model agents choose their peers and have to pay a connection cost for each member added to the group. After groups are formed, each agent selects a public project to make a costly contribution to, and all members of the group experience the benefi...

The analysis of lab data entails a joint test of the underlying theory and of subjectsíconjectures regarding the experimental design itself, how subjects frame the experiment. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing such conjectures. We use experiments of decision making under uncertainty as a case study. Absent restric- tions on subjectsí...

We study the extent to which communication can serve as a collusion device in one-shot first- and second-price sealed-bid auctions. Theoretically, second-price auctions are more fragile to collusion through communication than first-price auctions. In an array of laboratory experiments we vary the amount of interactions (communication and/or transfe...

We use a revealed preference approach to disentangle conformity, an intrinsic taste to follow others, from information driven herding. We provide ob- servations from a series of sequential decision making experiments in which subjects choose the type of information they observe before making their decision. Namely, subjects choose between observing...

We characterize environments in which there exists a representative agent: an agent who inherits the structure of preferences of the population that she represents. The existence of such a representative agent imposes very strong restrictions on individual utility functions -- requiring them to be linear in the allocation and additively separable i...

We study a dynamic matching environment where individuals arrive sequentially. There is a tradeoff between waiting for a thicker market, allowing for higher quality matches, and minimizing agents' waiting costs. The optimal mechanism cumulates a stock of incongruent pairs up to a threshold and matches all others in an assortative fashion instantane...

This paper uses a new data set on child-adoption matching to estimate the preferences of potential adoptive parents over U.S.-born and unborn children relinquished for adoption. We identify significant preferences favoring girls and unborn children close to birth, and against African-American children put up for adoption. These attitudes vary in ma...

We provide an overview and synthesis of the literature on how social networks influence behaviors, with a focus on diffusion. We discuss some highlights from the empirical literature on the impact of networks on behaviors and diffusion. We also discuss some of the more prominent models of network interactions, including recent advances regarding in...

Stability is often the goal for clearinghouses in matching markets, such as those matching residents to hospitals, students to schools, etc. Stable outcomes absent transfers need not be utilitarian efficient, suggesting the potential value of transfers. We study the wedge between stability and efficiency in large one-to-one matching markets. We sho...

The focus of this paper is the endogenous formation of peer groups. In our model, agents choose peers before making contributions to public projects, and they differ in how much they value one project relative to another. Thus, the group's preference composition affects the type of contributions made. We characterize stable groups and find that the...

We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, utilitarian aggregation necessitates a present bias. In lab experiments three quarters of “social planners” exhibited present biases, and less than two percent were time consistent. Roughly a t...

We present an experimental study of complex decentralized one-to-one matching markets, such as labor or marriage markets. In our experiments, subjects are informed of everyone's preferences and can make arbitrary non-binding match offers that are realized only when a certain period of market inactivity has elapsed. We find three main results. First...

We study the effects of network externalities within a protocol for matching faculty to offices in a new building. Using web and survey data on faculty's attributes and choices, we identify the different layers of the social network: institutional affiliation, coauthorships, and friendships. We quantify the effects of network externalities on choic...

Behavioral economics presents a "paternalistic" rationale for intervention by a benevolent government. This paper studies the desirability of various forms of collective action when government decisions are determined via the political process in response to votes by time inconsistent voters. We consider an economy where the only "distortion" is th...

The focus of this paper is the endogenous formation of peer groups. In our model, agents choose peers before making contributions to public projects, and they differ in how much they value one project relative to another. Thus, the groups preference composition affects the type of contributions made. We characterize stable groups and that they must...

We use laboratory experiments to test for one of the foundations of the rational voter paradigm - that voters respond to probabilities of being pivotal. We exploit a setup that entails stark theoretical effects of information concerning the preference distribution (as revealed through polls) on costly participation decisions. The data reveal severa...

We study the performance of two-sided matching clearinghouses in the laboratory. Our experimental design mimics the Gale-Shapley (1962) mechanism, utilized to match hospitals and interns, schools and pupils, etc., with an array of preference profiles. Several insights come out of our analysis. First, only 48% of the observed match outcomes are full...

We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, every Pareto efficient and non-dictatorial method of aggregating utility functions must be time inconsistent. We also show that decisions made via non-dictatorial voting methods are intransitiv...

Behavioral economics presents a "paternalistic" rationale for government intervention. Current literature focuses on benevolent government. This paper introduces politicians who may indulge/exploit these behavioral biases. We present an analysis of the novel features that arise when the political process is populated by voters who may be time incon...

We study the effects of network externalities on a unique matching protocol for faculty in a large U.S. professional school to offices in a new building. We collected institutional, web, and survey data on faculty's attributes and choices. We first identify the different layers of the social network: institutional affiliations, coauthorships, and f...

We study the effects of deliberation on collective decisions. In a series of experiments, we vary groups' preference distributions (between common and conflicting interests) and the institutions by which decisions are reached (simple majority, two-thirds majority, and unanimity). Without deliberation, different institutions generate significantly d...

We analyze a model of diffusion on social networks. Agents are connected according to an undirected graph (the network) and choose one of two actions (e.g., either to adopt a new behavior or technology or not to adopt it). The return to each of the actions depends on how many neighbors an agent has, which actions the agent’s neighbors choose, and s...

We present a dynamic model of deliberation in which `jurors' decide every period whether to continue deliberation, which generates costly information, or stop and take a binding vote yielding a decision. For homogeneous juries, the model is a reinterpretation of the classic Wald (1947) sequential testing of statistical hypotheses. In heterogeneous...

We study the effects of network externalities on a unique matching protocol for faculty in a large U.S. professional school to offices in a new building. We collected institutional, web, and survey data on faculty's attributes and choices. We first identify the different layers of the social network: institutional affiliation, coauthorships, and fr...

We combine survey data on friendship networks and individual characteristics with experimental observations from dictator games. Dictator offers are primarily explained by social distance, giving follows a simple inverse distance law. While student demographics play a minor role in explaining offer amounts, individual heterogeneity is important for...

This paper uses a new data set on domestic child adoption to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over born and unborn babies relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against African-American babies. A non-African-American baby relinquished for...

In contexts ranging from public goods provision to information collection, a player's well-being depends on his or her own action as well as on the actions taken by his or her neighbours. We provide a framework to analyse such strategic interactions when neighbourhood structure, modelled in terms of an underlying network of connections, affects pay...

We study the effects of network externalities on a unique matching protocol for faculty in a large U.S. professional school to offices in a new building. We collected institutional, web, and survey data on faculty's attributes and choices. We first identify the different layers of the social network: institutional affiliation, coauthorships, and fr...

We study the effects of deliberation on collective decisions. In a series of experiments, we vary groups' preference distributions (between common and conflicting interests) and the institutions by which decisions are reached (simple majority, two-thirds majority, and unanimity). When deliberation is prohibited, different institutions generate sign...

We study a simple model of a decentralized market game in which firms make directed offers to workers. We focus on markets in which agents have aligned preferences. When agents have complete information or when there are no frictions in the economy, there exists an equilibrium that yields the stable match. In the presence of market frictions and pr...

Institutions designed to increase turnout appeal to democratic sentiments but are highly debated as they entail two potentially countervailing effects. While generating more pieces of information, they may decrease the average voter's information quality. We examine two commonly discussed institutions inducing participation: abstention penalties (u...

In many environments, expertise is costly. Costs can manifest themselves in numerous ways, ranging from the time that is required for a financial consultant to study companies’ performances, to the resources necessary for academic referees to produce knowledgeable reports, to the attention and thought needed for jurors to construct informed convict...

We provide a simple characterization of updating rules that can be ra-tionalized as Bayesian. Namely, we consider a general setting in which an agent observes nite sequences of signals and reports probabilistic predictions on the underlying state of the world. We study when such predictions are consistent with Bayesian updating, i.e., when does the...

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the significance of information acquisition in mechanism design. We provide a stark example of a mechanism design problem in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on committees that are comprised of agents sharing a common goal and having a joint task. Members of the com...

The focus of this paper is the endogenous formation of peer groups. We study a model in which agents choose their peers prior to making decisions on multiple issues. Agents differ in how much they value the decision outcomes on one issue relative to another. While each individual can collect information on at most one issue, all information is shar...

The analysis of lab data entails a joint test of the underlying theory and of subjectsíconjectures regarding the experimental design itself, how subjects frame the experiment. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing such conjectures. We use experiments of decision making under uncertainty as a case study. Absent restric- tions on subjectsí...

We analyze a model of jury decision making in which jurors deliberate before casting their votes. We consider a wide range of voting institutions and show that deliberations render these equivalent with respect to the sequential equilibrium outcomes they generate. In particular, in the context of a jury setup, all voting rules excluding the two typ...

We analyze games on social networks where agents select one of two actions (whether or not to adopt a new technology, withdraw money from the bank, become politically active, etc.). Agents' payoffs from each of the two actions depend on how many neighbors she has, the distribution of actions among her neighbors, and a possibly idiosyncratic cost fo...

We combine data collected on friendship networks and individual characteristics with experimental observations from a sequence of dictator games run at an all-girls school in Pasadena, California. Our analysis provides two sets of insights. First, we flnd that dictator giving is primarily explained by social distance, deflned as the length of the s...

Social comparisons may seem to serve several positive functions, including self-enhancement. Frequent social comparisons, however, have a dark side. Two studies examined the relationship between frequent social comparisons and destructive emotions and behaviors. In Study 1, people who said they made frequent social comparisons were more likely to e...

In this paper, we focus on the effects of surname initials on professional outcomes in the academic labor market for economists. We begin our analysis with data on faculty in all top 35 U.S. economics departments. Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantl...

We provide an array of experimental observations pertaining to agents' endogenous selection of information. We study settings in which agents have to choose one of two actions, the value of which depends on an unknown state of nature. When given a choice between different information sources, more than half of all subjects choose a source that pote...

We analyze a model of diffusion on social networks. Agents are connected according to an undirected graph (the network) and choose one of two actions (e.g., either to adopt a new behavior or technology or not to adopt it). The return to each of the actions depends on how many neighbors an agent has, which actions the agent's neighbors choose, and s...

We analyze a model of diffusion on social networks. Agents are connected according to an undirected graph (the network) and choose one of two actions (e.g., either to adopt a new behavior or technology or not to adopt it). The return to each of the actions depends on how many neighbors an agent has, which actions the agent’s neighbors choose, and s...