This paper pursues two aims by conducting economic experiments in Shanghai. One aim of this paper is to investigate the following three anomalies on time discounting: the delay, interval, and magnitude effects. We confirmed all the three anomalies. Particularly, by separating the delay effect from the interval effect, the delay effect is found when the delay is relatively short, which has seldom been reported in former studies. Another feature of our experiment is that it is immune to the criticism that the subjects recruited for the experiment did not have sufficient incentives to report their true preferences because the highest reward that was offered to the subjects was approximately equivalent to their monthly household incomes. The second aim of this paper is its explanation of the subjects' procrastinating behaviors by their time discount rates and the degrees of the delay effect. Our analysis suggested that higher time discounting always promotes procrastination; however, the delay effect is negatively associated with procrastination. An interpretation of the latter result can be that our subjects, i.e., the students of Fudan University, are sophisticates rather than naïfs.

We conducted a series of experiments in order to investigate the relationship between the density of the local interaction structure and the equilibrium selection in coordination games with Pareto-ranked multiple equilibria. We observed that (1) the proportion of the risk dominant strategy is higher in less dense interaction structures than in more dense interaction structures in the long run, (2) the speed of convergence to the risk dominant equilibrium is faster in less dense interaction structures than in more dense interaction structures, and (3) the spread of the risk dominant strategy occurs earlier in less dense interaction structures than in more dense interaction structures. These findings indicate that the density of the local interaction structure matters in the equilibrium selection in coordination games.

This paper examines Chinese students' risk attitudes using selling and buying experiments with lotteries. We found that subjects were more risk averse during the buying experiment than during the selling experiment, suggesting an endowment effect. In the selling experiment, subjects were risk loving when there was a low win probability and risk averse with a high win probability, whereas they were risk averse in the buying experiment. Using the prize money won during the experiment as a measure of wealth, we found decreasing absolute risk aversion. Subjects' risk attitudes as revealed in the experiments explain their risky asset holding behavior. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.