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Auctions often require risk taking under time pressure. However, little is known about how time pressure moderates the relationship between uncertainty of outcomes and bidding behavior. This study consists of a field experiment in which participants are invited to a Vickrey auction to elicit their willingness to pay for a lottery ticket. The time available to place a bid and also the skewness of the lottery (holding the expected value constant) are systematically manipulated. We find that under high time pressure participants are less likely to place a bid at all. Furthermore, participants who do place a bid under high time pressure bid significantly less than participants under low time pressure. The main finding is thus that increased time pressure significantly decreases risk taking. The effect seems to be particularly strong for the lottery with a high probability of winning and for female subjects.

Sharing resources between members of different tribes and collectives is common and well-documented. Surprisingly, little is known about factors that are conducive to building social relationships between groups. We design a common-pool resource experiment, where after harvesting, groups can send some of their harvest to augment the resource of the outgroup. We compare donations made by individuals collectively and independently of other group members, under the conditions of equal and unequal resources. We find that individuals acting as decision-makers, but not groups, donate harvests frequently even though it is payoff-reducing. We conduct an additional treatment, where each donation is matched (doubled) by an equivalent transfer of resources, making sharing between groups payoff-improving. Under matching donations, sharing between groups flourishes, but fails to prevent resource decline in most groups. Finally, our experiment reveals that members of low-endowment groups overharvest resources in expectation of donations from affluent groups, which leads to the tragedy of the commons.

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