We report statistical results from a laboratory experiment in which participants were required to make decisions with monetary consequences in several solitary and interactive situations under acute stress. Our study follows the tradition of behavioral and experimental economics in selecting the experimental situations and incorporates elements from medical and psychological research in the way stress is induced and measured. It relies on a larger sample, with 192 volunteers, than previous studies to achieve higher statistical power. The main conclusion, drawn from binary comparisons between the treatment and reference groups, is that acute stress does not have a significant impact on cognitive skills, strategic sophistication, risk attitudes, altruism, cooperativeness, or nastiness. Regression analysis, controlling for psycho-social characteristics, corroborates these findings, while also suggesting that acute stress significantly decreases men’s risk aversion (as measured by a lottery-choice risk-elicitation task).

We report experimental results and test axiomatic models of unstructured bargaining by checking the empirical relevance of the underlying axioms. Our data support strong efficiency, symmetry, independence of irrelevant alternatives and monotonicity, and reject scale invariance. Individual rationality and midpoint domination are violated by a significant fraction of agreements that implement equal division in highly unequal circumstances. Two well-known bargaining solutions that satisfy the confirmed properties explain the observed agreements reasonably well. The most frequent agreements in our sample are the ones suggested by the equal-division solution. In terms of the average Euclidean distance, the theoretical solution that best explains the data is the deal-me-out solution (Sutton, 1986; Binmore et al., 1989, Binmore et al., 1991). Popular solutions that satisfy scale invariance, individual rationality, and midpoint domination, as the well-known Nash or Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solutions, perform poorly in the laboratory.

In a series of laboratory experiments, we explore the impact of different market features (the level of information, search costs, and the level of commitment) on agents’ behavior and on the outcome of decentralized matching markets. In our experiments, subjects on each side of the market actively search for a partner, make proposals, and are free to accept or reject any proposal received at any time throughout the game. Our results suggest that a low information level does not affect the stability or the efficiency of the final outcome, although it boosts market activity, unless coupled with search costs. Search costs have a significant negative impact on stability and on market activity. Finally, commitment harms stability slightly but acts as a disciplinary device to market activity and is associated with higher efficiency levels of the final outcome.

2010 -
member of the steering committee for the English-based degree program at the Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University

2016 - 2018
director of the English-based degree program at the Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University

2005 - 2007
secretary to the Department of Economics at Universidad de Navarra

I seek to analyze decentralized human interaction in the experimental laboratory and test key assumptions behind the prevailing model in economics. By observing decision-makers in controlled settings resembling real-life problems, I study social interaction in the absence of a central authority

The aim of this research is to study players' recognition of a game structure. We investigate this by using laboratory experimental method. We examine participants' behavior faced on some non-cooperative matrix games in a laboratory, and ask their subjective evaluations on outcomes. Through this study, we found their real perceptions on the game situations. This induces an analysis of standard of human behavior.The summary of the results of this research is that incentives based on individual perceptions, social preferences and monetary incentives strongly affect their decision makings, and this effect is very different among individuals. An analysis on the evaluation and the expectation of the opponents in games are still continuing. These results are summarized into two articles and they will be submitted to some international refereed journals very soon. More than 5 papers on related theory are accepted in several international refereed journals

This research treats an experimental study of voluntary contribution to public goods provision with endogenous institution formation. The main focus is on exploring alternative institution formation mechanism that further improves the overall efficiency. We found that the voluntary participation of institution and a plurality voting rule within the institution to decide among multiple available contribution levels generates a satisfying results. Comparing to other mechanisms, the improvement is mainly due to a increased contribution from players who do not join the institution in the first place.

We have collected and analyzed experimental data in two waves (January 2020 and January 2021) at LEEP (Paris, France). We have created four treatments to study unstructured bilateral bargaining.Our preliminary findings suggest that the amount of information available regarding the opponent's preferences has a significant impact on the bargaining outcome if earnings are deterministic: with full information there is a tendency to equalize monetary earnings, while with partial  information it is simply the number of objects that guides the negotiation. Interestingly,  probabilistic earnings (which are in line with theoretical models) lead to similar outcomes independently of the amount of information. As a consequence, the well-known Nash bargaining solution is a poor predictor in the "full information" + "deterministic earnings" setting (which often appears in empirical work), but performs much better in the other three environments that we have considered. An important conclusion of our study is that empirical tests (in the laboratory or outside) of bargaining theory should be carried out under a tight control of the decision-makers'  preferences. Otherwise, bargaining could be happening in units that differ from the theoretical ones and the ones assumed by the experimenter.

We analyse human decision-making in incentivized laboratory settings to answer fundamental questions about how people think about the conflict situations they face and to better understand their behavior. We complement the results presented by Veszteg and Funaki (2018) by using a broader and more systematic selection of symmetric situations.Our preliminary results, based on data gathered at Waseda SPSE in January 2020, point to the following directions.* The largest differences between induced and perceived conflicts (i.e., monetary incentives and utility) appear in situations known as battle of the sexes, anti-battle of the sexes, and coordination games.* Rationality (both based on monetary gains and declared satisfaction levels) ranges from 17% to 97% across situations. The lowest "performing" ones (in terms of both) are the prisoner's dilemma (43%), chicken (33%, 23%), battles of the sexes (40%, 33%) and anti-battle of the sexes (17%, 23%). These are also the ones with the least number of equilibrium strategy choices (below 63%).* There is no significant correlation between game-theoretical rationality and the decision-maker's social-value orientation, nor maximization score.* The occurence of mixed strategies is 24% across all situations, and 36% in those with an equilibrium in mixed strategies.

During the past academic year I undertook a research program together with Subhasish Dugar (University of Calgary, Canada). We designed a laboratory experiment to investigate the causal relation between group membership andopportunistic behaviour in a context that is ridden with informational asymmetry. We have collected data from two experimental sessions, and currently working on the related research paper.The context we focus on, otherwise known as an adverse selection problem,deals with two economic actors (a principal and an agent) who face a potentialcollaboration on a mutually beneficial project. If the principal decides to workwith the agent, she may offer a contract that specifies a wage forthe agent in exchange of which the agent is believed to put in work effort thatbenefits principal’s payoff. However, the agent could be a high calibre or a lowcalibre agent, and while that characteristic has an important impact on the results/outcome the agent is able to produce, it constitutes private information for the agent. Standard, neoclassical economic theory suggests that in our framework no interaction (between the principal and the agent) will take place. With the help of our experiments we would like to test a behavioural model which incorporates group identity and suggests a possible solution to the above-described adverse-selection problem. Simply put, we ask: what happens if both the principal and agent are from thesame group?