Essays in Experimental Economics

This dissertation comprises three essays in experimental economics. The first investigates the extent of strategic behaviour in jury voting models. Existing experimental evidence in jury voting models shows subjects largely act in accordance with theoretical predictions, implying that they have the insight to condition their votes upon their own pivotality. The experiment presented here tests the extent of these abilities, finding that a large portion of subjects behave consistently with such insight in the face of several variations on the basic jury voting game, but largely fail to do so in another, perhaps due to the difficulty of extracting informational implications from counterintuitive strategies. The second investigates the extent to which hypothetical thinking - the ability to condition upon and extract information from hypothetical events - persists across different strategic environments. Two games of considerable interest in the experimental literature - jury voting games and common value auctions - each contain the feature that a sophisticated player can simplify the problem by conditioning upon a hypothetical event - pivotality and winning the auction, respectively -