Evidence of general economic principles of bargaining and trade from 2,000 classroom experiments

Po-Hsuan Lin, Alexander Brown, Taisuke Imai, Joseph Wang, Stephanie W. Wang and Colin F. Camerer

Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics

Abstract: Camerer et al. use standardized experiments across thousands of students to demonstrate empirical regularities in two-person bargaining and trading in markets. Bargaining outcomes lean toward equal sharing, and markets rapidly create prices that match supply and demand. Standardized classroom experiments provide evidence about how well scientific results reproduce when nearly identical methods are used. We use a sample of around 20,000 observations to test reproducibility of behaviour in trading and ultimatum bargaining. Double-auction results are highly reproducible and are close to equilibrium predictions about prices and quantities from economic theory. Our sample also shows robust correlations between individual surplus and trading order, and autocorrelation of successive price changes, which test different theories of price dynamics. In ultimatum bargaining, the large dataset provides sufficient power to identify that equal-split offers are accepted more often and more quickly than slightly unequal offers. Our results imply a general consistency of results across a variety of different countries and cultures in two of the most commonly used designs in experimental economics.

Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published in Nature Human Behaviour 9 4(2020): pp. 917-927

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