One of the outstanding results of three decades of laboratory market research is that under rather weak conditions prices and quantities in competitive experimental markets converge to the competitive equilibrium. Yet, the design of these experiments ruled out gift exchange or reciprocity...

One of the outstanding results of three decades of laboratory market research is that under rather weak conditions prices and quantities in competitive experimental markets converge to the competitive equilibrium. Yet, the design of these experiments ruled out gift exchange or reciprocity...

Experimental and behavioral economics are well established branches in the economic science. This essay presents and discusses some results and behavioral regularities from these fields which are of potential importance for public policy. After a brief introduction of what experimental and...

Empirical studies have emphasized three important factors in firm-labor relationships: (a) organization costs of workers, (b) management opposition against workers' organizing drives, (c) the possibility of productivity enhancing effects due to "voice/response" reasons. In this paper the...

The opportunity to bargain often causes costs for at least one party in many economic situations, e.g. wage negotiations, joint ventures or interfirm cooperation. This paper studies such situations. A "strong" and a "weak" player have to agree how to divide the produced surplus. The "weak"...

A recently much debated issue is why observed investment and growth rates inpoor countries are lower than traditional theory predicts. Empirical evidencesuggests that social and political instability is a major reason for thedivergence between poor and rich countries. However, there is still the...

One of the long-standing puzzles in economics is why wages do not fall sufficiently in recessions so as to avoid increases in unemployment. Put differently, if the competitive market wage declines, why don't employers simply force their employees to accept lower wages as well? As an alternative...

The endowment effect describes the fact that people demand much more to give up an object than they are willing to spend to acquire it. The existence of this effect has been documented in numerous experiments. We attempt to explain this effect by showing that evolution favors individuals whose...

We study competition among market designers who create new trading platforms, when boundedly rational traders learn to select among them. We ask whether efficient platforms, leading to market - clearing trading outcomes, will dominate the market in the long run. If several market designers are...