Amidst a sharp increase in household debt levels, many countries have substantially reformed their consumer bankruptcy regulations. I first classify the mechanisms triggered by current U.S. and European bankruptcy regulations and then evaluate these mechanisms within a hidden action model. I...

This paper examines simple parimutuel betting games under asymmetric information, with particular attention to differences between markets in which bets are submitted simultaneously versus sequentially. In the simultaneous parimutuel betting market, all (symmetric and asymmetric) Bayesian-Nash...

Collusive agreements are often observed in procurement auctions. They are probably more easily achieved when competitors’ costs are easily estimated. If, however, the individual costs of bidders are private information, effective ring formation is difficult to realize. We compare...

In the Yes/No game, like in the ultimatum game, proposer and responder can share a monetary reward. In both games the proposer suggests a reward distribution which the responder can accept or reject (yielding 0-payoffs). The games only differ in that the responder does (not) learn the suggested...

This paper aims to integrate both economic and sociological notions of conventions in a single analytical framework. To this end, it starts by distinguishing conceptually between behavioral convention, i.e. an arbitrary but stable social regularity, and normative convention, i.e. a principle of...

A procurement contract is granted by a bureaucrat (the auctioneer) who is interested in a low price and a bribe from the provider. The optimal bids and bribes are derived based on an iid private cost assumption. In the experiment, bribes are negatively framed (betweensubjects treatment) to...

In a stochastic duopoly market, sellers must form state-specific aspirations expressing how much they want to earn given their expectations about the other's behavior. We define individually and mutually satisficing sales behavior for given individual beliefs and aspiration profiles. In a first...

We examine the effects of leading by example in voluntary contribution experiments. Leadership is implemented by letting one group member contribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadership increases contributions in comparison to the standard voluntary contribution mechanism,...