In this paper we consider conventions as regularities in behavior which help to solve coordination problems in a society. These problems can be formalized as non-cooperative games with several equilibria. We know that in such situations serious problems of equilibrium selection arise which...

Leadership is important for the well-functioning of organizations. We examine the effects of leadership on contributions in public goods experiments. Leadership by example is implemented by letting one group member contribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadership increases...

Voting is a natural context to investigate how democratic societies balance claims of economic efficiency against claims of distributive equity. We examine data from a series of simple experimental voting games; in each, voters are confronted with two distributional policies, one that promotes...